[bookclub] clean code by robert c martin 44/664
notes/thoughts from the pages i had read today, quotes are in "quotation marks". :
- "consistent indentation style was one of the most statistically significant indicators of low bug density" - care in details matters, not to maintain a program is the same as abandoning it.
- "quality is the result of a million selfless acts of care"
- “One might argue that a book about code is somehow behind the times—that code is no longer the issue; that we should be concerned about models and requirements instead. Indeed some have suggested that we are close to the end of code. That soon all code will be generated instead of written. That programmers simply won’t be needed because business people will generate programs from specifications. Nonsense! We will never be rid of code, because code represents the details of the requirements. At some level those details cannot be ignored or abstracted; they have to be specified. And specifying requirements in such detail that a machine can execute them is programming. Such a specification is code.”
- how do programmers take in request from the customer? what is important, how to translate their needs into tech requirements? i suppose you would need to really know the stack then, to be able to ask a person clarifying questions on the spot having the tech stack limitations/requirements in the back of your mind.
- i have seen a badly designed project eat up two weeks of work for two professionals. the project is still live. i wan to bring up possible refactor there.
to look up:
- Abstraction Descant by Richard Gabriel (abstraction is evil)
- acceptance tests
fun extras i looked up after reading:
robert c martin's rant on vibe coding, and his tweet from may 5th, 2025:
We need a new law. No AI should ever use a first person pronoun. This is because no AI is a person. Pretending to be a person is a very, very bad idea for a computer program. Especially an AI.