Software development is challenging because the software being developed is abstract, possesses enormous flexibility, and is extremely fragile. This also means that we have to take the quality and design of the code very seriously.
How to improve the efficiency of coding?
What are some tips, for both beginners and experienced developers, that can take them to the next level when coding?
How can we develop better software faster? What programming skills and coding skills can be borrowed?
As a software developer, you not only need to write code that the computer can recognize and execute, but also need to express your thoughts and ideas in the code so that others can understand it.
Five Ways to Improve Your Code and Code Design
1. Use code comments appropriately.
It's common to hear people say, "We need to add more code comments". I don't completely agree with this statement. I don't think "writing comments is wrong", on the contrary, I rarely see code comments being used effectively.
Too many comments are not conducive to the understanding of the code, the reasons are as follows:
Duplicate code: Excessive comments often just describe the code repeatedly, and do not provide additional information or help understand the intent of the code, which increases the redundancy of the code and makes the code difficult to maintain and understand.
Comments are easy to ignore and forget to update, and may be out of date. If the code changes and the comments are not updated accordingly, the comments will not match the actual code, causing confusion and errors in understanding and using the program.
Excessive comments can increase the verbosity of the code and make the code more difficult to read. Developers are constantly switching between comments and actual code, which increases the burden of understanding and maintaining the code.
Ambiguous expressions: Sometimes comments may not accurately describe the intent of the code, or the expression is not clear enough, which makes it difficult to read the code. This can lead to misunderstandings and wrong operations.
Writing self-describing code is a better option than excessive comments. The code itself should clearly express its intent and function, which requires us to adopt appropriate naming methods, modular code structure, and moderate comments. These measures can help improve the readability and maintainability of your code without relying too much on annotations.
2. The parameter list of the function should not be too lengthy.
Functions are overly verbose, making it difficult to read and understand, as well as making troubleshooting difficult. Such a situation raises the following questions:
A long parameter list reduces the readability of the code and makes the calling code of the function or method redundant and difficult to understand. Long parameter lists increase the time and effort required to read the code, since the need to keep track of the order and meaning of the parameters increases the difficulty of understanding the code.
When the parameter list is too long, it becomes quite difficult and error-prone to add, remove or modify it. Modifying the parameter list may require changes involving multiple callers, making code more difficult to maintain and introducing the possibility of bugs.
The problem of a long parameter list often means that the function or method has too many responsibilities, which violates the principle of separation of concerns. Functions should focus on accomplishing a specific task, rather than taking on too many responsibilities. By organizing related parameters as objects or using higher-level abstractions, you can achieve better separation of concerns and improve the readability and maintainability of your code.
Duplicating code is a bad coding practice that leads to redundant code and reduced maintainability. When the same or similar code is repeated in multiple places, revision requirements or bug fixes require changes for each copy, increasing the likelihood of errors.
The importance of separating attention and eliminating duplication is to improve code readability, maintainability, and extensibility. To achieve this goal, code can be broken down into smaller functions or methods, making sure that each function or method only focuses on a specific task. Through abstraction and refactoring, duplicate code can be eliminated, and duplicate functions can be abstracted into independent components or modules to improve code reusability and maintainability. This approach reduces redundancy in the code and makes the code more concise, clear and maintainable.
3. The function or method is too long, and there may be a design problem.
Functions that are too long are also not conducive to code quality. This situation usually raises the following questions:
The function is too long to understand and read, affecting readability. The code blocks are continuous and there are a lot of logical branches, making it difficult to understand the code and increasing the risk of errors.
Difficult to maintain: Modifying and debugging overly verbose functions can become extremely difficult. Because multiple functions are aggregated in a single function, modifications to this function may affect other parts of the code, resulting in brittle and difficult to maintain code.
Duplicated code means that there are a lot of repeated codes in overly long functions, which will make the code lengthy and difficult to maintain. It becomes difficult when these repetitive codes need to be modified.
4. Simplify the nested structure of conditional statements
The fourth problem is the complex nested conditional statement structure in the code. These complex nested conditional statements can cause the following problems:
Code is difficult to understand and read: Due to the complex nesting of conditional statements, the code becomes obscure. Multiple nested conditions and complex logic seriously affect the readability of the code, making the code difficult to maintain and debug.
Low code maintainability: Modifying and extending the logic of complex nested conditional statements often makes the code brittle and difficult to maintain. Due to the interleaving of conditional logic, modifying one condition may accidentally affect other conditions, thus increasing the risk of introducing bugs.
Poor test coverage: For complex nested conditional statements, the test coverage is relatively low, and it is difficult to fully test all possible conditional combinations. This can lead to hidden bugs and vulnerabilities in the code that are difficult to detect and fix.
5. If you want to maintain code quality and solve problems, finding the right tool is very important
As software engineers, our job is to solve problems, not write code. SoFlu software robot is the world's first software robot oriented to micro-service architecture design and best practices. It changes the traditional manual coding operation mode and realizes the business logic equivalent to writing complex code through visual dragging and parameter configuration. When designing business logic The development of micro-service applications has been completed, and "business is the picture, and the picture is the code", which greatly reduces the threshold of software development, and one person can solve all the work: back-end development, front-end development, testing, operation and maintenance, etc. So as to get rid of the excessive dependence of software development on manpower.
In terms of code quality, all packaged components in SoFlu software robots must be inspected by code quality inspection tools containing more than 3,000 inspection rules. At the same time, all JAR packages have been scanned for vulnerabilities to ensure stability and security. The source code exported by the development project can also pass code specification and vulnerability scanning. In addition, a series of built-in AI-based development, testing, product quality analysis and security audit functions can provide "expert-level" assistance throughout the application development lifecycle. There is also fine-grained authority management for the entire application development process, and the security of project assets is strictly controlled through the project asset security management mechanism to ensure information security. At the same time, it also has functions such as audit logs and management reports.
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