Lipstick on a Pig

This post was written at 2am by a sleep-deprived human Lipstick on a pig As humans, we have evolved to be very good at orienting ourselves in nature. A landscape, with mountains, rivers, and valleys is natural and we have a good memory for geographical references. And the same thing also happens with code - or so says Robert C. Martin. Therefore, our natural instinct is to remember the curvature of the code indentation, the syntax coloring in the rivers of characters, and the beautiful valleys between the scope blocks. This - according to Clean Coders - is not how we should be navigating code. Rather than relying on our natural hunter and gatherer instincts, we should name our functions and variables with meaningful names and keep them short - so short they should do one thing only. This way, I don’t have to memorize the mountains and valleys of the code and anyone joining the team can find their way through the code by simply reading the code. It’s like prose, not cartography.