this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Programming

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (28 children)

Go with what works

Error messages should contain the information that caused the error. Your average Microsoft error "error 37253" is worthless to me

Keep functions or methods short. Anything longer than 20 - 50 lines is likely too long

Comment why is happening, not what

PHP is actually a really nice language to work with both for web and command line utils

Don't over engineer, KISS. Keep It Simple Stupid

SOLID is quite okay but sometimes there are solid reasons to break those rules

MVC is a PITA in practice, avoid it when possible

[–] MaximumPower 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I don't have issue with methods being 200 lines, as long as they have a singel concept and is easy to follow.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

If the method does a long thing, the keep it long. I do a lot of data analysis and simulation, and so often people who came before had this urge to shorten methods, so we get:

def do_calculation(N, X, y, z, a, b, c):
    # Setup stuff
    for i in range(N):
        calclation(X[i], y, z, a, b, c)`

Sometimes there's a place for that, like if calculation could be swapped for a different function, or if calculation is used all over the program. It's a pretty good clue that something is up though when the signatures are almost identical. Of course, that has just led to people writing:

def do_calculation(big_struct):
    read_data(big_struct)
    calculate(big_struct)
    write_data(big_struct)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

There are various exceptions where up to 200 lines is still okay, yes. The 50 lines rule is more a good rule of thumb.

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