Clean Code and Squirrel Programming

I’ve been readying through the Clean Code book by Robert C. Martin. I am only a chapter or two into the book and I feel like my code is becoming much more manageable and easier to ready. Method length was probably my biggest offender. I also used to comment a lot in code but now I am writing more self describing methods and variables so I don’t need to comment as much.

I saw a squirrel this morning and it did the usual thing of running to the nearest tree. For whatever reason I thought it would be an interesting exercise to write some pseudo-code about an event they would handle; here it goes.

   1: protected void OnHumanSpotted(object sender, EventArgs e)

   2: {

   3:   List<Trees> localTrees = GetSurroundingTrees();

   4:  

   5:   Tree closestClimbableTree = GetSafestTreeToClimb(localTrees);

   6:  

   7:   if (closestClimbableTree != null)

   8:   {

   9:     Climb(closestClimbableTree);

  10:   }

  11:   else

  12:   {

  13:     FleeOnFoot();

  14:   }

  15: }

I like how you don’t need to know the implementation of any of the methods, the intent of the code is communicated through the method names. I am sure this could be improved even more by encapsulating the methods even more but it works for this simple example.

Cheers!