The Art of Readable Code

Part III. Reorganizing Your Code

In Part II, we discussed how to change the “loops and logic” of your program to make your code more readable. We described several techniques that required changing the structure of your program in minor ways.

In this part, we’ll discuss larger changes you can make to your code at the function level. Specifically, we’ll cover three ways to reorganize your code:

• Extract “unrelated subproblems” that aren’t related to the primary goal of your program.

• Rearrange your code so it’s doing only one task at a time.

• Describe your code in words first, and use this description to help guide you to a cleaner solution.

Finally, we’ll discuss situations where you can remove code entirely or avoid writing it in the first place—the single best way to make code easy to understand.