Day 17 | #100DaysOfCode

Expressive Clean Code

Tell beautiful stories with beautiful programs

Photo by Dmitry Bayer on Unsplash

A good storyteller has a strong command of his/her language and knows what constructs to use at which place to correctly tell any story beautifully.

Similarly, you must know the nouns and verbs (at least to start with) to be able to write clean expressive programs that tell a beautiful story to whomsoever reads them.

The nouns are the variables and classes, and verbs are the functions. Today, we will learn how to create and use them correctly.

Don’t underestimate the difficulty you’ll face for naming your variables, functions, and classes meaningfully. It’s not organic chemistry, but it’s still hard.

All right, let’s get started.

Clean Variable Names

FACT

Don’t spend too much time thinking of the right name — just write your code with different variable names in mind and see which one most closely fits with the code you have written.

A simple hard-and-fast rule you can always stick to is: The variable name should reveal three questions to the person who is reading your code.

1. Why does this exist?
2. What does it do?
3. How is it used?

Here are some additional points to keep in mind:

• Differentiating between two variables shouldn’t take much time. For example, these two variables take too much unnecessary effort to differentiate.

var XYZControllerForEfficientHandlingOfStrings 
var XYZControllerForEfficientStorageOfStrings

• Be careful while using characters like 1 (one) and l (lower-case L) or O (upper-case O) and 0 (zero).