Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship, 2nd Edition

9

The Clean Method

How do we write software? Nowadays, of course, most of us sit at our laptop and type into an IDE. We operate in a loop.

1. We write a small bit of code (with the possible help of an AI).

2. We compile and test it.

3. We go back to step 1.

That loop might take anywhere from five seconds to an hour depending upon the discipline you follow.

Of course, that’s not how it used to be. In the earliest days of programming, the loop was more like this.

1. We wrote a large bit of code by hand.

2. We desk-checked it by hand.

3. We submitted it to be encoded—by hand—into a machine-readable form.

4. We submitted it for compilation and test.

That loop often ...