The “bespoke development” site Evrone.com (an IT outsourcing company) interviewed Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson (who is also co-founder and CTO of Basecamp — and a racecar driver) shortly before he spoke at RubyRussia, Evrone’s annual Moscow programming conference.
And they asked him an interesting question. As a man who’s seen lots of Ruby code, “what makes code good or shitty? Anything that is obvious for you at first glance?”
David Heinemeier Hansson: If the code is poorly written, usually it smells before you even examine the logic. Indentation is off, styles are mixed, care is simply not shown. Beyond that, learning how to write great code, is a life long pursuit. As I said in my RailsConf 2014 keynote, we’re not software engineers, we’re software writers. “Writing” is a much more suitable metaphor for what we do most of the time than “engineering” is. Writing is about clarity and presenting information in a clear-to-follow manner so that anybody can understand it.
There’s no list of principles and practices that somebody can be taught and then they will automatically produce clear writing every time. If you want to be a good writer, it’s not enough just to memorize the dictionary. Just knowing the words available to you, knowing the patterns of development is not going to make you a good developer. You have to develop an eye. You have to decide that the most important thing for your system is clarity. When you do decide that, you can start developing an eye.
The only way to become a good programmer, where, by definition, I define good programmers as somebody who writes software with clarity, is to read a lot of software and write a lot of software.
In 2016, David Heinemeier Hansson answered questions from Slashdot readers.
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot