Comment by malux85 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by malux85 | Hacker News Reader

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Although at a high level many of things things are subjective, this take is almost entirely wrong in every dimension.

Anti-patterns are things like using a wrong data structure, using the wrong levels of abstractions, tightly coupling components so they are not composable, leaky interfaces, god objects doing too much

The strict definitions of many of these can be subjective at the edges, but they all objectively exist and cause fragility, instability, inflexibility and maintenance problems in the systems built from them.

Clean code is code that’s easy to read, has the right level of abstractions, uses the right data structures and has the minimal possible anti-patterns in them (ideally zero!) above.

Calling these things bogus is unfair, I grant they can be subjective in some places but they are prevalent in poorly designed systems especially by junior engineers.

Wikipedia page on anti-patterns: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Anti-patterns

There are project management anti patterns too https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern

Anti patterns are real. Clean code is real. If you cannot see that, I would suggest reading a lot more codebases from open source projects (pick medium and large codebases, not trivial programs) and after 10 or so you will see obvious structural and quality differences, as well as hundreds of anti patterns and examples of clean code.

I'll agree with everything here except the clean code. Clean code is about optimizing human perception and there can't be a standard for that because humans think in a wide variety of ways and it's further impacted by the level of understanding the human already has on the subject matter the code is dealing with. One person's "clean code" can be another person's nightmare.

I'll back this up with the example of Magento 1. It's a PHP e-commerce platform that has (at first glance) some of the cleanest code you'll ever see in PHP. It looked like the entire development team had come from a Java background. Every component was neatly divided into a PHP object with documented private and public methods. There was a clean MVC separation, with lots of shared behavior abstracted into "Helpers", and a Theme system handling the rendering of the front-end. I have no doubt that the authors of Magento prided themselves on how clean their code was. For them, having spent full-time careers structuring all the many features of their platform into these files, it probably did feel like a clean organization. And when I initially reviewed the code to evaluate using Magento, I also thought it was clean and was part of my choice to use it.

The problem was that when you take something as complex as a full-featured e-commerce system and modularize it so thoroughly, you end up with a literal 7000 classes, and it becomes impossible to figure out the sequence of execution of a single page request through that massive tangle. Is it "clean code" if I have to add debugging print statements to 57 source files to figure out the path of execution that renders a single page?

If I had to choose a circle of hell where I would edit Cyrus IMAP (the worst C code ever) for the rest of eternity, or edit Magento for the rest of eternity, I think I would actually choose Cyrus.

> Anti-patterns are things like using a wrong data structure

What is a "wrong data structure"? Is it wrong to do linear scans when hash access would be sufficient?

> ... using the wrong levels of abstractions

When is the abstraction level wrong? I can name you at least 10 projects that avoid so called anti-patterns by introducing unecessary abstractions. Is something really an anti-pattern if it's "solution" massively reduces your development velocity but now everything is nicely composable?

In my opinion, anti-patterns are either obvious (constantly using different names for the same thing) or totally subjective to the context (when to repeat yourself).

But maybe I'm not able to put myself into the shoes of novices and a lot of things seem obvious to me. Granted.

> What is a "wrong data structure"?

I've seen people use multiple named arrays, search for something in the first array, then use its index to find matching data in the other arrays, instead of a dictionary of string:tuple.

Another example is languages with arrays and vectors, usually one or the other is preferred. In Go you can use arrays but you're supposed to use slices whenever possible, while the opposite would be appropriate in, say, C.

This is a solid argument, thanks for taking the time to write this out!

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