If it is too complex, you are probably doing it wrong

-

If there is one thing experience has taught me, it is that too much complexity

in some code usually means that design is wrong. That does not mean that

everything must and can be as simple as 2 + 2, but complexity should sound some

inner alarm and should make you reconsider your approach.


If basic concept, without all convenience features is hard to follow then it is

most certainly wrong. Adding convenience features can bring some additional

layers of complexity and certainly plenty of code, but they don't usually pose a

significant problem if basic concept is done right.


There are many practices, patterns and advices going around that should help

writing clean and maintainable code, but two stand before all else. Violate

them and you will be in trouble, sooner or later (usually sooner or in the

worst possible moment).



Comments

  1. PeterApril 20, 2021 at 2:11 AM

    Agreed ! I'd put one other principle even before those two - OnceAndOnlyOnce. On all levels.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Coming in Delphi 12: Disabled Floating-Point Exceptions

-
Delphi 12 is in the works. One of its small features that will have a huge impact is a change in the default handling of floating-point exceptions, which will now be masked on all platforms. Previously, floating-point exception handling was different across platforms, and most notably on the Windows platform: In VCL and console applications, floating-point exceptions were not masked and would raise an exception. On the other hand, FireMonkey applications had all floating-exceptions masked by default, regardless of which platform they were running on. Basically if you haven't explicitly changed the exception mask in your code to some value other than the default, and you had code that attempted to divide some number with zero, you would get an EZeroDivide exception in previous Delphi versions on the Windows VCL application. In Delphi 12, there is no exception, and the result of such a division will be +INF . So the following code will no longer raise an exception. If you were r
Read more

Beware of loops and tasks

-
Loops and anonymous methods don't go hand in hand. Any variable that changes for each iteration will cause problems if it is used within an anonymous method. I explained the mechanism behind variable capturing in the post Mysterious Case Of Wrong Value , along with the problem it causes with loops and its solution. Commonly, anonymous methods are used as callbacks or event handlers, where there are no loops in the context where variable capture happens. While there is a possibility to have an unexpected—wrong—value in such scenarios, it is rather easy to debug them and understand the order in which some code is called, and why the captured value is wrong in a given place. With the rise of multi-threading usage, and especially the Parallel Programming Library and tasks, writing anonymous methods inside a loop becomes more common, and it is much easier to write code where a captured variable will have the wrong value. The biggest problem with such code is that it will be harder to
Read more

Catch Me If You Can - Part II

-
It has been quite some time since I wrote the Catch Me If You Can post about the inability of LLVM-backed compilers to catch non-call hardware exceptions. In other words, hardware exceptions raised by code written in the same block as the try...except exception handler. Since then, more LLVM-backed compilers have been added to Delphi, and with those, more reasons to change common coding practices... but still, very few developers know about the issue. The original article covered only try...except exception handlers, and exploring what exactly happens with implicit and explicit try...finally handlers was left as an exercise to the readers and to some future, now long overdue, post. And Now: All Hell Breaks Loose When you read about non-call hardware exceptions not being caught by an immediate try...except block, the implications might not look too serious. After all, while plenty of code can raise exceptions, try...except handlers are not that frequently used in places, as mo
Read more