I’m reading a book called Clean Code and it is fantastic.

The author, a developer who inexplicably refers to himself as “Uncle Bob”, is dramatic, arrogant, obsessive, and brilliant. Here are some gems from the first couple of chapters:

Flag arguments are ugly. Passing a boolean into a function is a truly terrible practice.

Side effects are lies. Your function promises to do one thing, but it also does other hidden things.

The proper use of comments is to compensate for our failure to express ourself in code. Note that I used the word failure. I meant it. Comments are always failures. We must have them because we cannot always figure out how to express ourselves without them, but their use is not a cause for celebration.

It takes a truly impressive amount of discipline to be so committed to simplicity:

Blocks within if statements, else statements, while statements, and so on should be one line long. Probably that line should be a function call.

Functions should not be large enough to hold nested structures. Therefore, the indent level of a function should not be greater than one or two.

The ideal number of arguments for a function is zero (niladic). Next comes one (monadic), followed closely by two (dyadic)… More than three (polyadic) requires a very special justification - and shouldn’t be used anyway.

Isn’t niladic a great word? And isn’t it a lot easier to do unit testing on a monadic function than on a polyadic function?

The book is written in Java, which is a bit disappointing to me as I am trying to put Java behind me and focus on What Is Really Important (i.e., python and R). The cool part is that every couple of pages I stumble on an aspect of Java that I’ve never learned; I’m compiling a list, so expect that in an upcoming post!