Because here’s the thing: you can save time and money merely by identifying the mindset of the company that will develop your software. If you believe that it is better to invest in the quality of a well-built foundation to later expand a product or maintain it well, clean code is a must.

Working with professionals with the same mentality will give you this kind of quality without losing speed in delivery. The software engineer will start to create the code thinking about the simplest and clearest way to reach the goal, even before writing the first line.

You see, the whole premise behind writing clean computer code is that the code is not intended only for machine consumption, but for human comprehension as well. That’s why it isn’t enough to analyze if the code achieved the goal, but how it was developed. Is it clear and readable? Is it easy to understand its purpose? Is it easy to look for bugs and maintain it for the long term?

Leonardo Da Vinci was absolutely right when he said that “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”. If you want a code that works for the long run and that won’t give you headaches in the future, you need it to be clean.

“Fine”, you say. “I understand that the best way to develop software is through clean code. But what exactly does that mean? Well, we can give you some practical examples. 

A clean code will have:

White spaces

There’s really no downside to using white space. It allows the code to be much more readable and makes each line stand out better.

Comments

Adding in-stream computer code can be priceless because it can describe exactly what a complicated function is supposed to be doing, and it can identify the order of operations for blocks of code.

Descriptive variable names

By coding with descriptive variable names, one can convey some idea of the variables’ functions instantly. Variable names with a single letter don’t describe anything and actually get in the way of a clear understanding of what the code is doing.

Short functions

All functions should have a single task, and that makes them easily maintainable for future developers. If a short function does have a bug included in it somehow, it’s always much easier to track down the problem when a function is short and has only one task to accomplish. That also makes the code more reusable in the future and more understandable in the present.

Good documentation

Any code should be well documented, so developers have a clear understanding of what the code is supposed to be doing. This becomes essential if the code itself has not been written in the cleanest fashion and is somewhat difficult to interpret. Documentation is an absolute must because, without it, it’s entirely possible that some computer code is so obscure that even senior developers will have a difficult time trying to understand it.

Consistency

A code should be as consistent as possible with naming conventions and with approaches to accomplish normal tasks. Ideally, a base style guide should be installed for all developers to follow, so that some level of standardization is possible. This always makes code easier to interpret and maintain, because it will all have a similar look and feel, even while the code itself can be completely creative and independent. 

Follow the DRY Principle

It means Don’t Repeat Yourself, or in other words, don’t write the same blocks of code over and over in your program. If the same block of code needs to be used more than once, it might be better suited as a function. This has the effect of keeping a program more compact and understandable.

Benefits of using clean code

Just to make sure we’re on the same page, we decided to list the benefits you get when writing clean code.

Maintainability

Long blocks of code are breeding grounds for bugs, and that’s a good reason to keep short blocks of code and short functions when coding. If a code is messy or difficult to read, it is very difficult to spot bugs, and that can cost a lot of time.

New software requirements

Often a program needs to be expanded to include additional features in another phase of development. When you start out with poorly written code, adding any kind of modifications can be a nightmare, and you can run into a situation where the new code causes the previous code to break down and not function correctly.

Easy to understand

Code that only one person can understand, i.e. the one who wrote it, is not very useful to an organization or community. In virtually all cases, a number of different developers will have to work on one project or an entirely new team of developers might pick up a project at a later date. The person themselves might even struggle to understand the code that he or she had written one or more years ago. That’s why clean code also means respect for fellow developers.

Search engines

When a website has long and messy code, it will cause multiple search engine spiders to sift through all that code in order to find the content they’re looking for. This can cause the site to be indexed inappropriately or not indexed at all, affecting the rankings of the search engines.

The conclusion of it all

After reading all that information, would you say we can agree that the only two reasons not to use clean code is the lack of knowledge or the lack of the right mindset?

We hope that this article has contributed to the understanding of what clean code is and what the mindset behind the concept truly is.  

Don’t be fooled by false promises. Be sure that poorly written code today = big headaches in the future.