Comment by phibz
5 years ago
This is the first time I've heard of this book. I certainly agree some of these recommendations are way off the mark.
One guideline I've always tried to keep in mind is that statistically speaking, the number of bugs in a function goes way up when the code exceeds a page or so in length. I try to keep that in mind. I still routinely write functions well over a page in length but I give them extra care when they do, lots of comments and I make sure there's a "narrative flow" to the logic.
The big one to keep an eye on is cyclomatic complexity with respect to function length. Just 3 conditional statements in your code gives you no less than 8 ways through your code and it only goes up from there.
All of these 'clean code' style systems have the same flaw. People follow them without understanding why the system was made. It is why you see companies put in ping pong tables, but no one uses them. They saw what someone else was doing and they were successful so they copy them. Not understanding why the ping pong table was there. They ignore the reason the chesterton's fence was built. Which is just as important if you are removing it. Clean code by itself is 'ok'. I personally am not very good at that particular style of coding. I do like that it makes things very nice to decompose into testing units.
A downside to this style of coding is it can hide complexity with an even more complex framework. It seems to have a nasty side effect of smearing the code across dozens of functions/methods which is harder in some ways to get the 'big picture'. You can wander into a meeting and say 'my method has CC of 1' but the realty is that thing is called at the bottom of a for loop, inside of 2 other if conditions. But you 'pass' because your function is short.
4 line functions everywhere is insanity. yes, you should aim for short functions that do one thing, but in the real world readability and maintainability would suffer greatly if you fragment everything down to an arbitrarily small number.
Number of bugs per line also goes way up when the average length of functions goes below 5, and the effect in most studies is larger than the effect of too large functions.