2006 / April 14^th/ Beauty in less code

Tonight I added new features to Poetry with meaning (on my local machine) — but I actually reduced the total lines of code in the project. I’ve made myself a promise that every time I add something new to PWM, I’m going to make the code cleaner, meaner, and more beautiful. I cleaned up some nasty find calls that were duplicated throughout the app and shoved them back into the models, where they belong.

Programming is not always about hundreds of thousands of lines of code powering a monstrosity that can calculate a trip to the moon and back — it’s about loving your code. One of the things I love about Rails in the push in the community towards more beautiful code. It’s not just about adding features or optimizing connections — it’s about finding a poetry in the code. You’ll find developers taking a couple extra minutes just to clean up their code after it’s working and perfectly functional. It warms my heart to find changes like this one in the Rails core because it shows such passion in the core team.

Next time you’re working on your code, take some time and pretty up the place a bit. Rename a function, encapsulate something into a helper method – do that thing you put off until “later.” I promise you’ll find more passion in your work and end up with a better product at the end of the day.

1. 

   Tristan Dunn

   April 14^th | #

   That’s the same reason why I love Rails. Now if I could only settle on one idea and complete it in Rails, that’d be great.

   By the way, your tag links don’t work.

2. 

   Veracon

   April 15^th | #

   I agree! Though I don’t use Rails (or Ruby for that sake), I always do my best to keep my code clean. That’s also why I’m writing a tiny Python framework that does what I need and nothing more (unlike Django or like). I’m hoping that a common page might just look something like this:

   def index(self, \*args):
       View('index').render(\*args)
   

3. 

   Veracon

   April 15^th | #

   Where did the indentation go? :O

4. 

   Ryan

   April 15^th | #

   Hear hear! Good words. It’s not always easy to want to go back and refactor code. If it works, don’t break it, right? But I think it’s especially important, as you add features, to think about how the new code interacts with the old code, and find ways to simplify existing stuff.

5. 

   Kyle

   April 15^th | #

   Veracon: I fixed it for ya :) Just some strange Markdown parsing stuff.

6. 

   Veracon

   April 16^th | #

   Thanks for fixing it, just one tiny mistake; it’s *args (asterisk), not _args. ;)

7. 

   Colin D. Devroe

   April 16^th | #

   I do this as well. My first pass on a project is very very rough, a “get to the idea” type of pass. Then I go back through to make sure it can take the load. Then I release it, then whenever I revisit the code I do exactly as you’ve said, I throw out the parts that are redundant, and do my best to make it as clean as possible.

8. 

   Mike Stickel

   April 17^th | #

   It has taken a long time for me to get to the point where I can optimize/clean my own code and I love it. After a certain point I think all developers ? at least the good ones ? do this. It is absolutely the best way to work IMO.

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