this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Programming
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Shorter code is almost always better.
Should you use a class? Should you use a Factory pattern or some other pattern? Should you reorganize your code? Whichever results in the least code is probably best.
A nice thing about code length is it's objective. We can argue all day about which design pattern makes more sense, but we can agree on which of two implementations is shorter.
It takes a damn good abstraction to beat having shorter code.
I mostly agree with this but more than shorter code I value readability, I would rather take 3 lines to be clear to any developer than use some obscure or easy to misunderstand structure to write it in 1.
Yep. And three functions is better than one for legibility even if one would be fewer lines of code
Here you go: https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/
But on a more serious note, I don't really agree. Writing more code needs to be a conscious choice, but going for the shortest code too often creates a mess. I know, since I was that junior dev who just wanted to get stuff done and I would ignore project architecture in order to have to implement less, like accessing the database in GUI code.
Shorter code with the same amount of coupling between components and with the same readability is always better though.
That being said, if you access the database in GUI there is a high chance that you will repeat yourself making the whole program bigger.
i used to think like this. nowadays I prefer readability, and even debugability.
sure, I could inline that expression, but if I assign it to a constant with a descriptive name instead, the next person reading that piece of code will not hate me.
shorter code is not always better, especially when it comes to types. building in lots of guard rails by being verbose with the type system is a good thing. "shorter = better" is the python approach that starts off fun and easy but the codebase scales extremely poorly.
I spent years writing an abstraction to be able to write shorter code... Not sure whether that was worth it 😅
Shortness for the sake of being short sounds like optimizing for the wrong metric. Code needs to be easy to read, but it's more important that the code is easy to change and easy to test. Inline code and function calls are renowned to render code untestable, and introducing abstract classes and handles is a renowned technique to stub out dependencies.
I think this is accurate on a larger scale, but I'll often do things like breaking up a large chain of methods with an interim variable just for readability. A few lines of simple math is better than one line of bit shifting wizardry that does the same thing but doesn't show the semantic meaning of the operation.