phpied.com

Tip #1 for writing better code - edit. With this book I write, I find I'm spending more time editing than writing. The first draft is usually bad. The first draft "works" in the sense that it covers the material, but not necessarily in the best possible way.

Same thing with writing code, it's one thing to have the code working and it's a separate thing to have the code easy to understand, efficient, maintainable, expandable. When you're working on a problem, sometimes you just try different things. One of them works. It's your job not to stop there but to edit this first draft. Don't commit first drafts.

There will be junk. It's up to you to make sure that junk doesn't find its way to the final product, only because "it works". It may work now, but how about tomorrow. Is your code fit for print?

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

- John Lennon

Project is what happens while you're busy with strategy, planning or priotitizing.

- Stoyan Stefanov

And I'm not even talking about other equally amusing activities such as updating your Gantt charts, percent task completion and WBS

Writing readable code means proper indentation. Usually you'd tab (or use 2 or 4 or 3 spaces) after every curly bracket. Something like this:

if (true) {
    // indent
    if (false) {
        // another indent
        // and some more
    }
}

Same goes when you have a bigger hash/object sort of thing:

var memememe = {
    name: 'Stoyan',
    family_name: 'Stefanov',
    blog: 'http://www.phpied.com',
    kids_count: 2,
    books_count: 3,
    occupation: 'programmer'
}

Sometimes I find myself going a little fancy and aligning all the values in the name/value pairs:

var memememe = {
    name:        'Stoyan',
    family_name: 'Stefanov',
    blog:        'http://www.phpied.com',
    kids_count:  2,
    books_count: 3,
    occupation:  'programmer'
}

But recently, inspired by Firebug's Net panel way of presenting header information, I tried aligning the keys to the right in addition to aligning the values to the left. So I ended up with something like this:

var memememe = {
          name: 'Stoyan',
   family_name: 'Stefanov',
          blog: 'http://www.phpied.com',
    kids_count: 2,
   books_count: 3,
    occupation: 'programmer'
}

Fancy, eh? I liked the way it looks. But then I thought that when writing maintainable code, anything fancy suggests uncommon, uncommon suggests that other team members won't be using it, so it means breaking the rule #1 of writing maintainable code: be predictable. (this also happens to be rule #1 of other common activities, such as driving on the highway and designing usable web sites)

This type of formatting is also not easy to type in an editor, so it will require a little more effort. Those two drawbacks are enough, I believe, to dismiss this idea. But I can't help myself liking the way the code looks. Here's a piece of PHP, which looks even better than javascript, because even more characters are centered.

<?php
$memememe = array(
          'name' => 'Stoyan',
   'family_name' => 'Stefanov',
          'blog' => 'http://www.phpied.com',
    'kids_count' => 2,
   'books_count' => 3,
    'occupation' => 'programmer'
);
?>

Ain't that cool?