Series

Code Smells

In this series, we will see several symptoms and situations that make us doubt the quality of our developments. We will present possible solutions. Most are just clues. They are no hard rules.

Articles in this series

Code Smell 01 - Anemic Models

Oct 20, 20202 min read 1.1K views

TL;DR: Don't use objects as data structures Protocol is empty (with setters/getters). If we ask a domain expert to describe an entity he/she would hardly tell it is 'a bunch of attributes'. Problems No Encapsulation. No mapping to real world entit...

Code Smell 01 - Anemic Models

Code Smell 02 - Constants and Magic Numbers

Oct 20, 20201 min read 631 views

A method makes calculations with lots of numbers without describing their semantics. TL;DR: Avoid Magic numbers without explanation. We don't know their source and we are very afraid of changing then. Problems Coupling Low testability Low readabi...

Code Smell 02 - Constants and Magic Numbers

Code Smell 03 - Functions Are Too Long

Oct 22, 20201 min read 339 views

Humans get bored beyond line 10. TL;DR: Refactor and extract functions longer than 5 lines. Problems Low Cohesion High coupling Difficult to read Low Reuse Solutions 1) Refactor 2) Create small objects dealing with some tasks. Unit test them. 3) ...

Code Smell 03 - Functions Are Too Long

Code Smell 04 - String Abusers

Oct 23, 20201 min read 339 views

Too many parsing, exploding, regex, strcomp, strpos and string manipulation functions. TL;DR: Use real abstractions and real objects instead of string accidental manipulation. Problems Complexity Readability Maintainability Lack of Abstractions S...

Code Smell 04 - String Abusers

Code Smell 05 - Comment Abusers

Oct 24, 20202 min read 652 views

Code has lots of comments. Comments are coupled to implementation and hardly maintained. TL:DR; Leave comments just for important design decisions. Don't explain the obvius. Problems Maintainability Obsolete Documentation Readability Code and ...

Code Smell 05 - Comment Abusers

Code Smell 06 - Too Clever Programmer

Oct 25, 20202 min read 442 views

Code difficult to read, tricky with names without semantic. Sometimes using language's accidental complexity. TL;DR: Don't pretend you are too smart. Clean code asks for readability and simplicity. Problems Readability Maintainability Code Quality...

Code Smell 06 - Too Clever Programmer