Read Code and Make It Cleaner

Contributed by: Maximiliano Contieri

Difficulty level: Easy

Refactoring and renaming code that isn’t clean is crucial to understanding and maintaining large systems.

To start, identify areas that need improvement. Look for code duplication, a common culprit of maintenance nightmares. When you find behavior duplication, you can extract it into reusable functions or classes, reducing redundancy, creating a single source of truth, and simplifying future updates.

Behavior duplication is a sign of a missing abstraction you need to create. As always, you should search for it in the real world. Refactoring isn’t a one-time event; it’s an ongoing process that should be integrated into your development workflow.

Here is an example of code duplication in Python:

def calculate_area_of_rectangle(length, width):
    area = length * width
    return area

def calculate_perimeter_of_rectangle(length, width):
    perimeter = 2 * (length + width)
    return perimeter

def calculate_area_of_square(side):
    area = side * side
    return area

def calculate_perimeter_of_square(side):
    perimeter = 4 * side
    return perimeter

You can see that there’s duplication in the calculations for both rectangles and squares. The functions calculate_area_of_rectangle and calculate_perimeter_of_rectangle perform similar calculations as calculate_area_of_square and calculate_perimeter_of_square, but for different shapes.

Refactoring

Refactoring is the process of changing the code but not the functionality. ...