It’s not enough for the code to work so it can be called clean. It needs to be easy to work with (debug and maintain). Following the upcoming principles can help your code be easier to understand, explain, change, extend, debug, and be more focused.
Meaningful names
label your symbols clearly in a pronounceable, searchable manner. that avoids mental mappings, buns, and cleverness. pick one word per concept and make names short.
Elegant Functions
write small well-defined functions that do one thing only without side effects (pure functions — that do not change global variables or print to the console). this keeps your code DRY, structured, and focused.
Correct Comments
Avoid redundant, misleading, mandated comments. instead, use informative and clarification comments. comments should be minimal and describe why you are using this approach or the end goal of your block of code. your code should be self-describing and show the intent of what’s doing, so don’t comment on every line of code describing its functionality — library documentation is made for that.
Standardize Your Formatting
Format your coding correctly according to a standard agreed upon. This makes your code easy to navigate and familiar to developers who use the same formatting standard.
Refined Classes
keep them small and cohesive (doing one function and all its parts are related to it). Define your abstraction well. focus on responsibilities and isolation.
Error handling
Define a normal flow and handle all errors and exceptions by using try, catch, and finally language constructs, unchecked exceptions, and provide context when throwing your exceptions.
Automated Testing
Test your code at least with unit tests. Also, use integration components, and end-to-end tests. Use all the safeguards you can.
clean code is meant to be beautiful, elegant, optimal, maintainable, concise, and ready for new features. All this makes the code pleasant to work with.
writing clean code is an art in itself. It’s like drawing a painting and making those subtle decisions that are hard to define still everyone can judge the painting and feel its elegance although they might know nothing about painting. Same with clean code it needs practice until you master these subtle decisions that produce results seen by everyone.