Kent Beck gives us some resourceful advices to develop great code, and they are not even that technical...he talks of generic tips n tricks that can be carried out by anyone, great for beginners and for expert folks, too. Most of the things that we have learned from three basic values: communication, simplicity, and flexibility.
Communication
Programs are read much more often than written and therefore should communicate clearly their intent. Code is primarily means of communication. (For a typical enterprise system, a lot of code will be modified by many programmers over 5 – 15 years and they’ll all need to understand it.)
Simplicity
Eliminate excess complexity. Apply simplicity at all levels. Simplicity helps communication by making programs easier to understand. Communication helps simplicity by making it easier to see what is excess complexity.
Flexibility
“Making workable decisions today and maintaining the flexibility to change your mind in the future is a key to good software development.” – Implementation Patterns, Kent Beck
Programs should be flexible in the ways they change, they should make common changes easy or at least easier. Complexity can often arise from excess flexibility, but if that flexibility is not needed then it is waste. The best kind of flexibility comes from simplicity coupled with extensive tests. Trying to create flexibility through design phases or the likes usually ends up with this kind of “complex flexibility”. Most of the time you do not have enough information to make a proper design decision about where your program will need to change, so maybe postponing your decisions until the las responsible moment is a valid and useful approach. That is when you have the best grounds for any decision.
These three values are just to start a great chain of keys that would take you to the best coding experience, the more you practice them, the more you get to write code remarkably.
