CS222 and CC17

It has been many years since I have required my CS222 Advanced Programming students to read chapter 17 of Robert Martin's Clean Code. This chapter is entitled "Smells and Heuristics," and it contains a wonderful collection of common code problems and potential solutions. This year, I had my students read the chapter just before starting our two-week project, and I gave them the challenge to pick three items from the reading that were particularly interesting to them. These were fun for me to read, displayed thoughtful reflection on programming, and to top it all off, were easy to grade.

Some of my favorites showed up in the students' responses, such as the advice to extract conditionals into named functions, to replace magic numbers with named constants, and to avoid selector arguments. Feature envy showed up more than once, which surprised me. Students recognized that some of their previous courses actually habituated them to these smells rather than their cleaner alternatives.

I need to remember to keep this assignment. I plan to ask my students today whether they think this chapter would have made a good introduction to our reading rather than a capstone on it. Because the chapter is so accessible, it's possible that reading it first might help them get better faster, and to do so before they get into the trickier distinctions such as SRP (Chapter 10) and the distinction between objects and data structures (Chapter 6).