Notes of A Philosophy of Software Design--Takeaway
Published: Dec. 22, 2020
Here are the most important software design principles discussed in this book.
- Complexity is incremental: you have to sweat the small stuff.
- Working code isn’t enough.
- Make continual small investments to improve system design.
- Modules should be deep.
- Interfaces should be designed to make the most common usage as simple as possible.
- It’s more important for a module to have a simple interface than a simple implementation.
- General-purpose modules are deeper.
- Separate general-purpose and special-purpose code.
- Different layers should have different abstractions.
- Pull complexity downward.
- Define errors (and special cases) out of existence.
- Design it twice.
- Comments should describe things that are not obvious from the code.
- Software should be designed for ease of reading, not ease of writing.
- The increments of software development should be abstractions, not features.
Summary of Red Flags
Here are a few of of the most important red flags discussed in this book. The presence of any of these symptoms in a system suggests that there is a problem with the system’s design.
- Shallow Module: the interface for a class or method isn’t much simpler than its implementation.
- Information Leakage: a design decision is reflected in multiple modules.
- Temporal Decomposition: the code structure is based on the order in which operations are executed, not on information hiding.
- Overexposure: An API forces callers to be aware of rarely used features in order to use commonly used features.
- Pass-Through Method: a method does almost nothing except pass its arguments to another method with a similar signature.
- Repetition: a nontrivial piece of code is repeated over and over.
- Special-General Mixture: special-purpose code is not cleanly separated from general purpose code.
- Conjoined Methods: two methods have so many dependencies that its hard to understand the implementation of one without understanding the implementation of the other.
- Comment Repeats Code: all of the information in a comment is immediately obvious from the code next to the comment.
- Implementation Documentation Contaminates Interface: an interface comment describes implementation details not needed by users of the thing being documented.
- Vague Name: the name of a variable or method is so imprecise that it doesn’t convey much useful information.
- Hard to Pick Name: it is difficult to come up with a precise and intuitive name for an entity.
- Hard to Describe: in order to be complete, the documentation for a variable or method must be long.
- Nonobvious Code: the behavior or meaning of a piece of code cannot be understood easily.