Clean Code: Intro, Clean Code and Meaningful Names (up to the end of chapter 2)

[Michael Nelson]

On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 7:42 AM, Andrew Wilkins
<andrew.wilkins at canonical.com> wrote:
> Decent read so far. Lots of reasonable ideas (obvious ideas, even!), though
> some were a bit too dogmatic for me to swallow whole.
>
> I think for me the most important sections were (in chapter 2):
>  - Use Intention Revealing Names,
>  - Add Meaningful Context, and
>  - (to a lesser degree) Don't Add Gratuitous Context
>
> "Use Solution Domain Names" before "Use Problem Domain Names" also resonates
> with me. Juju hasn't been too bad about this, but I've worked on things
> before where it's taken a lot of effort to understand things simply because
> the names were in the problem domain when they didn't need to be. This makes
> it difficult to ramp up. I think this is especially important to juju, since
> it's Open Source. If we want to encourage contributions, then it's important
> to minimise the barriers to entry.

(just joining the book review for the ride - I hope it's not open to
juju-devs only)

This was one of the 'aha' moments for me in chapter 2 - the worth of
solution domain names for better communication with other readers of
the code (who generally will be more familiar with the domain of
computer science than the domain of the problem). Additionally I think
that using solution domain names consistently, where appropriate,
gives us a lot more opportunity for improving our own heuristics of
various pros and cons for patterns in different contexts. (But the
author adds one or two reasons for problem domain names too).

I also enjoyed the format of the 1st chapter... there are great
opportunities to learn from each other generally in
software-engineering (we're doing it constantly), but more often that
not it's at the code-review level. It was nice to read some personal
reflections from people who've gathered a huge base of experience -
and feel a little mentored by the masters :-)

-Michael