This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
A Final Thought
This major cleaning will greatly facilitate the growth of the project. The time it took will be paid back many times over simply because there’s a clear and obvious place to put the needed changes; and those changes aren’t likely to interfere with each other or with the overall flow of the system.
However, the new structure is not cost free. Those who complain that it is harder to read because of all the different modules and all the indirection are not without a point. Yes, adding structure adds complexity—and that complexity is not free. There’s a cognitive price to pay. But we knew that the cognitive load was going to grow, and so our goal was to minimize that growth by creating an organization that would accept it gracefully.
What about performance? Is the new structure slower than the old one? Probably so. There are a few more references that need to be followed, and switch statements are easier for compilers to optimize than polymorphic dispatch. But the difference in performance is probably so tiny that you could not easily measure it. For most applications, that tiny decrease in performance would be of no concern at all.
This chapter, and the chapter before, were a whirlwind tour through the low-hanging fruit of clean code. But now that tour is over, and it’s time to get down to the basics. And, of course, we begin with names.
