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Beautiful Code Interview
An anonymous reader writes "Safari Books Online has just posted an interview with Andy Oram and Greg Wilson, the two editors who put together the recent O'Reilly book, Beautiful Code. "Beautiful Code" features 33 different case studies about challenging coding scenarios from some of today's most high-profile developers and OS project leaders. There's also a new Beautiful Code web site based on the book where many of the authors are blogging about their work and coding practices."
Is anyone else jaded by these books that go on and on about why a particular techique or code snippet or methodology is "right" or "beautiful" or "the way forward"?
...then there's some of the frameworks and methodologies out there that are generally worshiped as God's own code, but which when you try to use them turn out to be cumbersome, horrible, unintuitive messes. Years later this is suddenly "discovered" (EJBs I'm thinking of you!!!) and a whole new set of horrible frameworks goes through several iterations (Hibernate 1 vs 2 vs Spring persistence, Struts vs Spring MVC) where nothing is allowed to mature for long enough to have the major bugs ironed out.
I look at some of the code mentioned and yes it's neat. Some of the code snippets from these books (not just this one specifically) is either really obvious or makes me want to blow chunks because it's an over-complication or over-simplification just to demonstrate a technique which you know will be over-applied and end up in some set of corporate standards that sees it being misused.
Perhaps I'm just getting old but I'm really getting tired of all this. You want to know what makes code beautiful?
1) It does the job 100% correctly as intended.
2) It does it as simply as possible - not so simple it doesn't work, and no more complex than it absolutely needs to be...building everything in but the kitchen sink just in case is a fool's game.
3) It's readable and well documented enough that anyone who knows the language (or better yet a programmer familiar with a similar framework but not this one) understands it.
4) Its easy and quick to make changes as requirements change - that means GUI tools for GUI development (What ever happened to RAD tools being the norm in the industry!? It can take a week to make significant changes to a web page in Struts or Spring MVC, where it use to take about a day to do it for the clients developed with the RAD tools of the late 90s!)
5) It fits in well with the rest of the system. A module that works beautifully in isolation but doesn't fit in with the system can ruin the system.
All the rest is just a bunch of consultants trying to bilk you for cash.
Yes patterns can help, but they can also hurt.
Yes externalizing code into config files can make a system more flexible (but you'll pay for it in readability and tracability/debugability).
Yes aspects of the agile methodology - continual integration and test driven coding - can help but they're not the only way and there's a cost associated.
Yes Object oriented code offers things that procedural does not, but again there's a cost and your developers better understand the language constructs.
You need to look at each of the above as tools in your arsenal, not religious doctrine.
Note that my recent experience is with Java/J2EE so that's where my examples come from but I've worked on dozens of languages and frameworks.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Ugh, Java frameworks.
Somebody needs to drag the people who make these things in a room, erase their memories, and make them use what they have created. Perhaps then they can start to feel how asinine they can be sometimes. It is as if they get off on how many design patterns, random XML config files, and other "best practices" they can cram into a single framework. "We're switching to using a BuilderFactoryGatewayStrategyFacade." Thanks for the heads-up guys, we were all dying to know exactly how you implemented it! (Don't forget to scatter pattern names all over your code. People have to know you're using them!) All I want to do is integrate such and such framework in with my program. But, no, I have to read the documentation that describes the problem and how exactly to use the framework. Inevitably, they begin spouting off about how "elegant" it is that you can configure exactly which IntFactory to use by hard-coding the classname in a mandatory configuration file that is prone to getting lost at deployment time. (Remember, making objects with just the new operator is a classic beginner's mistake, don't fall prey!)
The end result is you end up with what should be a fairly simple task (like OO-relational mapping) have 400 page manuals because it ends up doing every little thing that people want to do. In the time it takes you to choose the right framework, download and install the binaries, wade through the required config files, sift through the quickstart, and actually get familiar with how it is done, you could have just written and tested the tedious JDBC code to load and unload an object from the database.
But, why do that? There's no hype around that! You're not REALLY an enterprise architect until you have twenty different config files that need to be present just to run your product! If it is an enterprise product, it shouldn't be simple to configure!
All of these products do serve legitimate needs. But the obsessive over-engineering that surrounds them and the religious fervor by which they are declared Good (despite violating the principle of least surprise at every turn) point to fear. A fear that the code you're writing just isn't good enough somehow. The fear that your code is too simple, too straightforward. A worry that that requirement you're meeting is mission-critical, and, mishandled, could threaten the stability of the entire system. This isn't usually the case. It would seem that Java's simplicity sort of drives its hardcore users mad after awhile. What it lacks in expressiveness, people try to make up for by inane configuration and extensibility instead of just sitting down and Getting The Damn Thing Done. Sure, the code is boring. The best code is anything but glamorous.