Code readability

I had an interresting discussion with a co-worker the other day about code documentation and formatting. Lately I have moved away from my previous traditional views on the matter. Earlier my main focus would have been about consistency and similarity. Things like having a header on each class, property and function explaining what it is and what it does is. In addition things like using regions within files and how to order functions, properties, private functions, events and so on within a class.

All this is done in the name of readeability right? At least we think we do. We have become so good at managing these things that we completely forget to ask ourselfe why the class has grown so obeese that we need a set of rules to navigate within it. Mybe we create these rules to enable us to write crap code and still feel good about it? I am not really convinced that setting up a huge ruleset in tools like StyleCop makes your code more readable. Of course it would make it readeable in the sense that if someone gave me a handwritten letter and then handed me the same letter written on a computer both in some language I don't understand.. I would probably be able to read the words letter by letter from the computer version more easily. Does it really matter? It's not like I would understand any of it anyway. Same thing when looking at code. Crap code doesn't get any better just because it's all formatted the same way.

The same goes for code comments. Does the function GetCustomerByName need a comment? If it needs a comment does that mean that the function does more than retrieving a customer by it's name? Maybe the name really is GetCustomerByNameOrInSomeCasesCreateOrder. If so this code doesn't need comments it needs some hard refactoring. Difficulties when choosing a good name for your function is usually a code smell.

My point here is that your code should do the talking. It should express it's true intention. Lets look at two peices of code. The first one being a brute force implementation and the other being a bit more rafined.

Implementation 1

Implementation 2

So what's the difference between the two? Basically the second example has split the functionality up into well named classes, functions and properties.  In my opinion this is not a problem unless youre writing performance critical low level stuff. Specially not when using disk or network resources.

What I am trying to say is focus on making the code readable before you focus on getting it well formatted. And most likely, when you get the code readable the need for standard formatting would be way lower.