[dba-Tech] How to write beautiful code

[Rocky Smolin]

I use long variable and field names.  That's a habit from COBOL days when
the code, if done right, would read almost like air code.

I use spaces between chunks of code that I liken to paragraphs. And use lots
of one line comments which, in the VBA window come out green.

I use continuation characters so that a line of code never goes off the
screen to the right so I have to horizontal scroll to the right to see
what's beyond the display.

And most importantly, I indent religiously especially for nested Dos and
Ifs. 

Most of these disciplines I developed out of self-defense as I was a lone
ranger developer and had to maintain or revisit code that I might have
written years ago.

Would you call that beautiful?  How do you define beautiful?

r


-----Original Message-----
From: dba-Tech [mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of
Arthur Fuller
Sent: Friday, December 28, 2018 10:24 AM
To: Discussion of Hardware and Software issues
Subject: [dba-Tech] How to write beautiful code

How many of you listers take into consideration whether your code is
beautiful or not? I confess that I'm a big fan of both beauty and
refactoring, I liken this process to an artist's sketches that lead
ultimately to a painting.
I begin with a sketch, and I use pen and paper because no software I've
tried compares to what I can accomplish in a few hours with a sketchpad and
a pencil or pen. I'm over 70, and I no longer even try to keep up with the
latest developments in software, even within my own specialty, databases.
I modestly consider myself a pretty good SQL programmer, but have written
more than a few front ends to databases I've designed and developed. Those
projects range from being one of 8 members of a team developing a
health-care system involving 500 tables on 8 servers (for privacy
considerations, not to mention the physical size of the databases in
question -- imagine a database that includes the population of Ontario, and
a related database consisting of all the physicians in Ontario, and the
necessity of PITA (Point In Time App -- c.f my article on this topic at Red
Gate's Simple Talk site). In a medical app, you might need to track a
particular patient and discover who her physician(s) were in 1999, and then
track their diagnoses and the results they measured -- assuming they
bothered to follow up. This is not a general accusation of all physicians,
but there are provably more than a few bad apples in the basket.
I digress. How many of you listers appreciate the art of beautiful code,
and how many of that selected set are employed in companies who appreciate
gorgeous code?
Another prejudice I readily confess: extensive comments do not compensate
for gorgeous code. On the other hand, I also believe that every previous
version ought be commented and included in the source file(s), with
comments describing why the original code was deemed insuffficent, either
because it overlooked boundary conditions or simply because there existed
much quicker algorithms to solve the given problem. Take a simple problem
such as sorting a million stocks of interest, and analyzing what happend
since Christmas this year. One day it skyrockets and the next day it
plummets.
Yet again I digress, but I'm on a thought train here, and will send this
and also follow with the second part of this thesis. Returning to the
subject at hand, all us programmers are going to die soon, and all that
will be left of us, other than ashes or a hole in the ground, is the code
we wrote. That's why I demand that the code we write be beautiful. It ought
to be self-explanatory, so our successors can immediately understand it,
and take over once we're six feet deep. That is our responsibity, and our
obligation, and that's why we must write beautiful code. The next
generation of use senior citizens will need to read our code, and
understand why we made the decisions we made. And then improve our
techniques.

-- 
Arthur
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