99 bottles notes and quotes
"good code not only works, but is also simple, understandable, expressive and changeable."
"good code can also be defined simply, and somewhat circularly, as that which provides the highest value for the lowest cost"
"Code that is easy to understand and a pleasure to extend naturally feels simple and elegant."
"In his paper, McCabe describes his Cyclomatic Complexity metric, an algorithm that counts the number of unique execution paths through a body of source code. "
"A method with many deeply nested conditionals would score very high, while a method with no conditionals at all would score 0."
"Cyclomatic complexity does not predict application development time nor does it measure programmer productivity. Its desire to identify code that is difficult to test or maintain aims it directly at code quality."
"Speculatively General is the second longest solution, and has the second highest Flog and Worst Bit scores. Its length and complexity reflect an attempt to arrange the code such that certain imagined changes will be easy, i.e. to guess the future. These guesses are unlikely to pay off and relative to the other solutions, Speculatively General is both longer and more complex than necessary."
"Shameless Green is defined as the solution which quickly reaches green while prioritizing understandability over changeability. It uses tests to drive comprehension, and patiently accumulates concrete examples while awaiting insight into underlying abstractions. It doesn’t dispute that DRY is good, rather it believes that it is cheaper to manage temporary duplication than to recover from incorrect abstractions."
"The challenge comes when a change request arrives. Code that’s good enough when nothing ever changes may well be code that’s not good enough when things do."