A kick in the arse

Looks like the IT industry is going to take a break for tea and biscuits in coming years. And you know what? -- we sure as hell asked for this. We needed a major kick in the ass to get real, and here it is finally. Unreadable code What makes me think we're in deep shit? Well, I've worked on a few projects last 18 months for a large US company that loves to outsource, and I had to take a deep dive into some of .Net Framework's source code. Some of our projects we had to build over those projects other outsourcers had already completed. I've seen a lot of scary stuff (more on .Net later, in other posts), tons of barely readable texts. Yes, it's texts we're actually writing, guys, think twice about how you're gonna name your next class, next method, even next local variable. I'm sure that the vast majority of software developers is not even up for the job -- I mean crafting readable software not only takes a good developer, it takes one that has gut-feeling for simplicity, one that has his/her way with words, it might even take one that is not a developer at all. Right now maintainability of the vast majority of applications is lower than negative infinity. Make 'em usability tests if you're not sure you've created a good class (after the design meeting) -- drop a class diagram by your colleagues, make your manager approve this "time-waster", step up. I thought of giving a little (rather ill) example. Meant to tell you about how much time I've killed over a method which was named something like PrettyPrintAnErrorMessage(...) -- and it actually filtered exceptions inside, threw some kinds and swallowed others. The point of the story would have been: give a meaningful name to a method -- the one saying what the method _really_ does. I called that example rather ill because naming was not the only problem there -- it's just so not the way to handle exceptions (me and my guys had to do helluva job when we've found out about that _pretty_ printing). I decided to cut the story short because the computer science, the OO theory itself, C# language construct's names present some bigger issues. I'm gonna take the singleton pattern to make a point. You have to define the singleton as a class, right? But it's not a class at all -- a class is "a group, set, or kind sharing common attributes". You see where I'm going with this? The computer science, the OO theory, C# encourages us to write crap that only we understand, encourages by having a vocabulary where many words (like class) we might use in everyday life have odd meanings. By making the science's vocabulary (every science has one) simpler, by removing those cross-vocab intersections, we could make texts -- I mean code -- more readable. But it's a little late for that change, isn't it? The only thing we can do, as our part of the job, is to admit: we, software developers, are regular people, and so is the vocabulary we're using most of the time. Leave with it. No fancy names, just plain and simple stuff. I mean this: even the names of domain classes are to be reviewed if they're cryptic. Domain experts are regular people too, they may suck at giving names to things -- as much as we suck at naming classes today.