Software Molestations. (no - this is not about web radio transmissions of deep-under-cover agents)
There's this guy, Martin Fowler, who dislikes some software patterns. Saying: "I don't like this stuff" doesn't make much of an impression in the code-slinger biz, so he created the term "Code Smells".
Most folks don't want to seem "smelly" - so he has waged an effective campaign to make people code as he prefers.
Things that "smell", according to Martin, are:
There's this guy, Martin Fowler, who dislikes some software patterns. Saying: "I don't like this stuff" doesn't make much of an impression in the code-slinger biz, so he created the term "Code Smells".
Most folks don't want to seem "smelly" - so he has waged an effective campaign to make people code as he prefers.
Things that "smell", according to Martin, are:
- Duplicated code
- Objects that do to much
- Objects that do to little
- Right-side-up control (He prefers inversion)
- A class that uses some other class too much
- A class that "knows too much" about another class
- Too many parameters to a method
- A method that is too big
- Very long names
- Very short names
- Methods that return more than its callers care about
- And, most likely, jokes in the comments, identifiers beginning with vowels, code written with vi or emacs
Taking a page from Fowler's book, but pushing the technique a little further, we come up with "Code Molestations". No one wants to admit to molestations.
Some Code Molestations are:
- Using a too-powerful IDE to create programs that can ONLY be maintained in an an IDE
- Spraying the disk (or repo, or cloud) with thousands of tiny files that exist only to impart a NAME to some existing Type. (e.g. Create a "Title" class that does nothing but rename "String")
- Over use of Objects. State, etc. where it is totally unnecessary.
- Under use of Plain Old Functions.
- "Map" concepts that dont really map anything (just screwed-up syntax on top of Iterators) - Maps in functional language RETURN SOME COLLECTIVE RESULT! And they don't make you COLLECT something at the end!
- CamelCaseNazisWhoCantResistMolestingAcronyms (aka CCNWCRMA)
- UpcaseNazisWhoCantResistMolestingConstants
- functionsDeclarationsThat(inMentionSomeParamrters,inOutMentionOthers,outOnlyLieAboutOthers)
- bigLongConstantNamesForIteratorsWhoShouldBeCalled "i" or (j,k,l...x,y,z,a,b,c)
- 10 Functions that only return only one thing (with all the added documentation, tests, etc) where one function that returns a (logically related) COMBINATION of things would be superior (think Matlab, or Scheme, or Perl)
- Guys that use group-think stunts to promote their coding preferences, because they lack logical arguments to support them.
