Programming style and best practices

Important Advice

• Simple > Complicated
• Explicit > Implicit
• Ability to read code > Ability to write code
• Comments don’t explain your code to humans, code explains your comments to the computer
• The best procedure is no procedure
• Don’t overuse a programming paradigm (OOP, functional)
• It’s not what you know, it’s what you do with what you know
• Leet Code doesn’t mean much of anything
• The most valuable skill is the ability to figure things out
• Before you ask what something does, think through it
• That said, if you are really stuck, please ask questions

Best Practices

Use getters and setters

Avoid unnecessary public variables, getters, and setters, but use getters and setters to control access to private members.

Curly braces go on the same line as the statement they are tied to

Except for really long function declarations

public class Example {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        if (args.length > 5) {
            System.out.printf("Hello World!\n");
        }
    }
}

Lines should not extend over 80 characters

Examples of how to deal with long lines. This doesn’t matter too much, you can do it many ways.

public static ArrayList<String> reallyLongFunction(double thisArgument, 
        const String thatArgument, ThisClass anArgument) {

}

// This is one of the only time to put 
// the curly brace on the next line
private ArrayList<double>
 anotherFunction(double thisArgument, 
                 const String thatArgument, 
                 ThisClass anArgument) 
{

}

Constants are named in screaming case

String THIS_IS_SCREAMING_CASE = "Helicopter";

Classes start with a capital letter, variables start with lower case

ThisIsAClass thisIsAVariable = new ThisIsAClass();

Use JavaDoc when you can

/**
 * This says what the functions does
 * 
 * @param int This describes the parameter
 * @return This describes the return
 * 
 * @author Just don't use this w/o asking
 */
int thisIsAFunction(int a) {
    return -a;
}

Credits

Initially written by Justus Languell in August 2021