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by cjfd
2349 days ago
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'You have not worked on bad enough code base.' You know, it is a bit pretentious to read a few sentences that someone wrote and then conclude a lot about what they know or do not know. And I actually do know what ravioli code is. I think ravioli code is mostly a good thing. Also the people on the c2.com page are not uniformly negative about it. Not all code should be ravioli code but in a project with complex requirements there should be quite a bit of ravioli code. It is true that ravioli code is not easy to understand if you are a newcomer to a project but really if the context is 'a project with complex requirements' why would anyone think that it is easy to get into, no matter how it is written? Another thing is that ravioli code absolutely needs automated tests. 'This style maximizes maintainability by old hands at the expense of comprehensibility by newcomers.' Maintainability is exactly what I want maximized. It sounds a bit bad if there are no developers that are there for a long time. But in that case you are cooked anyway, I would say. |
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Preferable state is high internal cohesion and low coupling. Most code is opposite. Ravioli is when you trade high coupling without introducing cohesion, which is structure. Typical state after dumb refactor rather than rework.
Simple extraction of functions does not get you anything (if done well within a module, maybe increases cohesion), while making them reusable modules trades reduced cohesion for increased coupling, which is bad.
If you deduplicate too much you suddenly cannot change anything simply... As every place that got deduped is now coupled to one implementation. Once you need some special care, you get to replicate it again oftentimes.
Only true primitives are really worth it to not replicate and parts of code that won't change. (Ask the crystal ball again.)
See if deduplicaton gets you any of useful high level designs, like MVC, event-driven, reactive, message based. Without overarching design, you end up with a mass of locally useful ones that together are incompatible thus requiring lots of different, unique glue code.
The big mistake people do is to equate design patterns with code patterns. Which is what the silly GoF book did a lot. For example "fire and forget background parallel tasks" is a design pattern. Reactor (executes Strategies to deal with Events) is one while Singleton or Context are not. Event also is not. Etc. Generally anything that doesn't actually structure anything is a code pattern.