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Shhh! Keep Quiet and Just Code for Humans
How to reduce noise and communicate effectively in JavaScript
The ease with which we can maintain code matters tremendously. Code maintainability impacts everything, from job satisfaction to delivery speed (arguably one and the same).
But what makes a codebase easily maintainable? The right technology choice? Fewer lines of code? Low cyclomatic complexity? Yes, yes and yes! But there’s something fundamental which underpins all of the above — good communication.
Picture the following scenario. You’ve just cloned a repo to your local machine, and you can’t wait to get stuck in. You confidently open up index.js thinking, “I’m about to make the world a better place”, and then it hits you — a massive wall of indecipherable text. Why can’t you understand it? Is it a matter of skillset?
If it’s hard to get your head around a concept in a real-world conversation, it can only mean two things:
- The concept is too complicated for your current ability
- The concept was not communicated to you effectively
The same is true in the index.js scenario. You can’t understand the code because of one of the above. We’re going to talk about the latter.
Communication
Language is the principal method of human communication. Programming languages exist so that we can effectively communicate the inner workings of programs to other people.
“No!” I hear you cry, “The purpose of programming languages is to instruct machines!” — nope, think again. Trust me when I say; machines do not understand whatever language you enjoy writing in your favourite code editor. By the time it gets anywhere near a machine, it’s literally ones and zeros. The English part is for us, humans.
When you write code, you’re essentially describing a program to somebody else who needs to make sense of it in the future. And that future person might even be you! So you’d better make sure you communicate properly — if your only goal is to make the…
