What would ”nice looking”—or ”beautiful”, for that matter—actually mean when referring to source code? I asked some programmer friends what they thought that meant. Their answers were obvious, but still worth stating:
- Code should be locally coherent and single-functioned: One function should do exactly one thing. It should be clear about what it’s doing.
- Local code should explain, or at least hint at the overall system design.
- Code should be self-documenting. Comments should be avoided whenever possible. Comments duplicate work when both writing and reading code. If you need to comment something to make it understandable it should probably be rewritten.
» Shawn McGrath | kotaku.com