Reflections on Clean Code and Professionalism

Motivation

I’m currently reading the book Clean Code - A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship. I was advised by my college that this is a very useful book. It aims to teach what actually works in practice, as opposed to what might work in theory. From it, one can learn how to write cleaner code to be considered a professional, because only true professionals write clean, unambiguous (easy-to-read) code. I believe every programmer should push themselves to become better. Programming is challenging, and writing good code is equally so, but learning to write clean code can be beneficial in the long run. As a good professional, one should always consider that the code they write will be read by someone else (or even themselves) in the future. Furthermore, this code should be easy for other professional programmers to follow.

Quote from this book: “In general, programmers are pretty smart people. Smart people sometimes like to show off their smarts by demonstrating their mental juggling abilities. After all, if you can reliably remember that r is the lower-cased version of the url with the host and scheme removed, then you must clearly be very smart. One difference between a smart programmer and a professional programmer is that the professional understands that clarity is king. Professionals use their powers for good and write code that others can understand.” ```