Readability Counts

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
Have you found unreadable code and wondered how to fix it? Have you ever seen code that was simply a pleasure to read?

If you've ever wondered what makes code easy to read, this talk is for you.

During this talk we'll learn a number of techniques for refactoring code to improve readability and maintainability.

Transcript

1. Readability Counts @smitthakkar96 1
2. README.md • Chief Architect at Corridor Funds • Opensource Contributor at Gluster, fossasia, and NgUI • Organizer at GDG Gandhinagar • Github: github.com/smitthakkar96 • Email: smitthakkar96@gmail.com 2
3. –Wikipedia “Readability is the ease with which a reader can understand a written text.” 3
4. Why does readability matter? • Readability is about making our lives easier • Code is read more often then it is written • Better readability means better maintainability • Readable code makes on boarding new contributors/ developers easier. 4
5. We’ll not discussing • Optimizing the code to run fast • Design Patterns • Programming Language Speaking robots
 
 
 
 
 
 
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6. We’ll discuss • Programming Style Guides • Choosing Meaningful Name • Writing meaningful comments • Program Organization
8. Programming Style Guide
9. – wikipedia “Programming style is a set of rules or guidelines used when writing the sourcecode for a computer program..”
10. I am new to programming, I am not aware about standards how to I make a style guide?
11. Build one on top of the standard ones • Google Style Guides • PEP8 for Python • Java specs by Oracle • etc..
12. Choosing meaningful names
13. –Phil Karlton “Two hard things in computer science are cache invalidation and naming things.”
14. Avoid Generic Names tmp tmp2 mana ger data
15. ucf = UpperCaseFormatter() ba = BankAccount() formatter = UpperCaseFormatter() account = BankAccount() Avoid Abbreviations
16. Avoid using datatype as name array = [1,2,3] string = "girlscriptsummit is awesome" numbers = [1,2,3] review = "girlscriptsummit is awesome"
17. Nouns & Verbs Use nouns for variables and classes. size, price, Task, Scheduler, Bank Account Use verbs for functions. get_file_size, make_account, deposit
18. number = [1,2,3,4] numbers = [1,2,3,4] Use plural names for data structures like arrays
19. Comments
20. Don’t say the obvious # increments x by 2 x = x + 2 # compensate for border on both the sides x = x + 2
21. # The following is an optimization to save # lot of memcache calls. Handle with care! ... Explain why you made that choice
22. # -- XXX -- Smit - Sep 2015 -- # UTF-conversion was failing for a Chinese # user for reasons I couldn't understand. # Added "ignore" as second argument to handle # that temporarily. name = name.encode("utf-8", "ignore") Document special cases
23. # find length of the longest line n = max([len(line) for line in lines]) n = len(longest(lines)) Make Comments Unnecessary
24. Program Organization
25. Divide & Conquer Split the program into small independent modules and functions.
26. The 7 ± 2 Rule The number of objects an average human can hold in working memory is 7 ± 2. - Miller's Law
27. Separate what and how def main(): filename = sys.argv[1] words = read_words(filename) freq = wordfreq(words) print_freq(freq)
28. Avoid too many nested levels def update_post(...): post = get_post() if action == 'update_title': update_post_title() elif action == ‘add-tag’: update_post_add_tag() else: update_other_data() def update_post(...): post = get_post() if action == 'update_title': if title == '': ... else: ... elif action == 'add-tag': ... else: ...
29. White spaces and line breaks
30. Questions?