We’ve both been there.

You open your favorite programming IDE, and right there. A glorious mess of spaghetti code. You have no clue what it means, and you can’t understand a single thing.

Bad code can waste precious hours of time, when it really should have only taken a few minutes to understand the code if it were refactored and cleaned up.

So today, I’ll teach you, in five simple tips, how to spare other programmers from facing a giant plate of spaghetti.

1. Stop Commenting

That’s right. Stop commenting. While this is controversial, comments are a sign of bad design. If someone needs to read your comment to understand what your code is doing, it is a sign that your code is unreadable. Follow common conventions for your programming language, and make sure what you’re writing is self-explanatory. Which leads into my second tip…

2. Use Good Variable Names

Everyone knows this, but few actually do it correctly. First of all, and this is the critical, stop shortening your variable names. Yes, you can shorten the word “minimum” to min, but if you’re working on an application that handles time, your reader may think min refers to minutes. In particular, if you’re shortening a word, and that shortened word can possibly refer to more than one word, don’t do it.

Readers may also be confused if your variable names don’t actually say what you mean.

For example, imagine if you created a variable called “days”. What does that mean? Days elapsed? Days before something happened? The amount of days in the month? Be specific. Refactor days to daysElapsed, daysInMonth. Do NOT put a comment and write “days refers to the days elapsed since …”. That is absolutely nonsense. Make your variable names self-explanatory.

3. Keep It Simple, Stupid!

Ah, the good ol’ KISS principle. The simplicity of your code determines whether someone looks at your code and says, “WTF IS THIS?” to “Okay, this makes sense.”

If you’re programming a certain function, be clear. Avoid using silly round-about ways. Especially avoid “clever” solutions. Clever and tricky solutions may be shorter or faster, but they can cripple reading speed. Usually, when people do these clever solutions, they will put comments everywhere to compensate for the fact that no one actually understands what they wrote, which ties into tip #1.

This principle also applies to re-inventing the wheel. If your language comes built-in with a feature, use it. Don’t re-implement a data structure that already exists. Often, it isn’t the programmer’s fault, though, since they might not know about the existence of a certain feature. However, this is not an excuse when you are working with other programmers. If what you wrote in 100 lines could be replaced by 1 line, then it should be refactored.

4. Stop Creating God Objects

A good object is one that knows only what it should know, and no more.
A god object is one that knows too much, in particular, things that it shouldn’t.

For example, imagine you had a chair object. It should not know anything except for itself. If your chair knows your social-security number, how much money you make a year, and how many chairs there are around it, then your chair is either the world’s greatest secret spy agent, or it shouldn’t exist.

5. Public Exposure

All variables in a class should be private, unless there is a very compelling reason for a variable to be public. There are very few reasons for a variable to be public, unless it is a global constant, such as Math.PI.

The inverse of this is also true. Stop exposing your privates! If your private variable does not require a getter, do not make a getter. You should be encapsulating your code.

If you have a rectangle class, and you only ever need its area, then don’t make a getter for its width or length. Just make a single public method that multiplies the private width and length variables.

Hide your implementation details! If you have a computer, and you just want to send an email, then there is no reason the user would need to know about the internal workings on the computer. The user doesn’t care how many volts the computer needs. The user doesn’t care about how many gigabytes of RAM the computer has. The user just wants to send an email. And your computer should allow them to do exactly that, in one simple function, without knowing anything else about the computer.

Remember these five points, and you’re sure to write cleaner code.