Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by mastermojo | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

mastermojo

Node: https://github.com/nodejs/node

React: https://github.com/facebook/react

Vimium: https://github.com/philc/vimium

If you want more, here is probably a good place to start: https://github.com/EvanLi/Github-Ranking/blob/master/Top100/...

View on HN

I mean, those are popular, but what makes them well-written? What do you see in them that makes you say those are amazing projects?

My impression from when I read a big chunk of the React codebase to confirm some suspicions about how they'd implemented hooks ("wait, if that's how these behave, does that mean they... no, surely they didn't... well, yep, that's exactly what they did") was that it had more layers of abstraction than would be ideal and was a bit under-commented, but not awful.

Instead of pure code try seeing it as a book. If I read a book with a lot of spelling/grammar errors, a story that goes nowhere, characters that aren't interesting to me, plots that make no sense, etc..., then I'd tend to think of it as a not well written. Same with code, if variable names are obscure, function names don't match what they actually do, needless abstractions, nonexistent documentation, no tests, etc..., then I'd tend to think of it as a not well written project. Those aren't the only things I look for, but that's a start for me.

One could also argue, "why does it matter how it's written, it's not a book and it does what I need to do so that's fine." If it works and you don't have to do anything, great. If you have to troubleshoot it because it broke, then hopefully the code is structured in a way that lends itself to debugging. Otherwise, you might end up having a bad time.

For myself I'd say the lodash repo is well written. Would you agree/disagree?

I think at this point we can all roughly agree on what makes code well-written?

1. Stylistically consistent for things like format, naming, control and logic flow

2. QA: linted, unit tested, code reviewed

3. Design: Modular, scalable, future proof, secure, stable, reliable, performant etc.

4. High adoption implies testing/verification of above design attributes

5. Follows (or establishes) best established practices for interfacing with platform APIs etc.

6. Keeping complexity low enough that a junior engineers can contribute

7. Descriptive commit messages

etc. etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com