Tidyings are Almost Done
Paid subscribers have been getting finished tidyings, 2-3/week. They are almost complete, so I wanted to recap what’s out there & ask for suggestions about what to write next.
The overall outline of TF? is:
Tidyings—simple acts of software design that enable change.
Management—how much, who, when, when to stop, how to coordinate.
Theory—why this all works, economics, optionality, power laws, coupling & cohesion.
The catalog of tidyings looks like this:
Guard Clause
Delete Dead Code
Normalize Symmetries (needs a new name)
Reading Order
Cohesion Order
Explaining Variable
Explaining Constant
Explicit Parameters
Chunk Statements
Extract Helper
One Pile
Add Comment
Delete Redundant Comment
We may end up with 1 or 2 more, but I think that’s it.
So, what would you like to hear about next?
P.S. I’ll be rolling out the Tidying Leaderboard to everyone soon. If you use a tidying in the wild & send me a link to the PR (public code only, please), I’ll put you on the board. Catch ‘em all!
I have another tidying at the tip of my tongue, but I'm not really sure how it works. I think the key is Sequencing. Sometimes code is all intermingled because someone wanted to make it "efficient", and I find that if I ignore "efficiency" and order the code in a clear, sequential, chunked manner, it's easier to read and obvious inefficiencies stand out for better improvements. This probably sounds vague. I'll see if I can find an example.
Hello Kent, as programmers we read a lot of code. We also read a lot of logs produced by these programs. The attention to the readability/consistency/correctness/… of these logs is often overlooked. Wouldn’t it be something worth tidying ?