[sebstefan]

>I don't find Casey's performant version less readable

It does create implicit coupling. If you try to add a new shape you will run into the problem.

In the clean code version, your compiler will remind you to implement calculateArea

With his version you have to add a new `case` to every switch statement and hope you didn't miss one with a default case, because the compiler won't catch this one.

It's a crap way to code

[Tenticles]

people using clean code ideologies are being prematurely pessimistic and assuming they know much more about a problem than they actually do when they use these clean code techniques. "I don't know how many shapes I've been asked to do, so I'll assume the worst case scenario and make the code slower and harder than the simple naïve solution that would be hard to read(debatable) if we had one million shapes" is a terrible argument and it is why everything goes slow.

The correct way to deal with this, is refactoring to a more maintainable code once you know the amount of shapes will wildly change, As soon as we get too many shapes as the problem has changed. You can only pretend to know what is the best architecture for a problem when you have dealt with it several times.

Clean code apologists pretend their single time dealing with website backend is proof enough that clean code works and that it works for every problem and that it has to be the default approach and is the most readable for most problems. It is a total insanity for something that can't be measured with any tool.

Edit:

I fully understand that "premature optimization is wrong" but using these "guidelines" is premature optimization of scalability and maintainability. Somehow when the "premature optimization" is about things you people want that's somehow okay? pff

Also, I don't find clean code readable, it looks like complex, un-refactorable garbage to me 9 out of 10 times. No wonder why people are so fucking scared of rewriting a class and act is if it will take months to do so, this ideology makes impossible to actually play around with your code, you can't neither make it more readable or more performant, you are locked in with a sluggish collection of dozens of files even for the simplest of problems.

[mrkeen]

> people using clean code ideologies are being prematurely pessimistic and assuming they know much more about a problem than they actually do when they use these clean code techniques.

No. The techniques are there to let you change your codebase as you learn more about the problem.

[Tenticles]

there are two ways in which I can understand your message:

a) "these techniques allow for an easy to refactor codebase". I profusely disagree, its easier to refactor a function with some ugly switch than a behavior disseminated over dozens of files.

b) "we are actually careful and not draconian about these techniques only when appropriate", which I don't agree either, as in every experience I had interacting with people that believe in clean code in meatspace, was an obsession with having things done their way, assertions about "code smells" which were literally just not doing whatever they wanted.

maybe there's a c) I'm not seeing. But seeing this thread on its own its already high evidence that these two notions are clearly there in the CC community.

"we are actually performant" becomes "well, actually we are readable" becomes "well, actually we are testable" becomes "well, actually humm... just shut it and write on our code style". Some posts on this thread even talk about people not using these guidelines being evil and having to be ejected. Just imagine how people not suck up on this ideology look at it.

[sebstefan]

It doesn't have to be slow. There's a reason "Clean code" is being criticized everytime it's mentioned. It touts inheritance and polymorphism as a solution to everything like it's 2002. There's been enough "Inheritance considered harmful" articles to toss that aside

The take on switch statements is covered in "The Pragmatic programmer" as well, which coincidentally is much less criticized when it comes to books about clean code.

The way to fix the switch is getting rid of the class "shape" and making it an interface, then implementing the interface in each shape, as a non-virtual method. And then you don't let people inherit. They can compose instead.

Performance is unaffected, you get rid of the switch, the compiler catches your mistakes for you, and everyone's happy