this post was submitted on 12 May 2024
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[โ€“] xJREB@lemmy.world 16 points 6 months ago (1 children)

As a software engineering researcher, I strongly agree. SE research has studied code comprehension for more than 40 years, but for that amount of time, we know surprisingly little about what makes really high-quality code. We are decent in saying what makes very bad code, though, but beyond extreme cases, it's hard to come to fairly general statements.

[โ€“] SandbagTiara2816@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Genuinely curious - what do we know makes code very bad?

[โ€“] xJREB@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago

A few bad things in code for which we have fairly consistent evidence:

  • high nesting depth
  • meaningless or single-letter variable names
  • lots of code duplication
  • very inconsistent formatting
  • very complicated Boolean conditions with AND and OR
  • functions with a lot of parameters