Best software practices: readability

Best code readability practices. Gathered from various sources.

• Write boring code.
• Dad code comes from ignorance, not from evil. Don’t ignore things.
• Leave code in a better state than it had been before you got it.
• Change one thing at a time.
• Comments should explain why the code is doing something, not what it is doing.
• If you run into an unfixable complexity outside of your program, put a wrapper around it that is simple for other programmers.
• There is no perfect design, there is only a better design.
• A good programmer should do everything in his power to make what he writes simple for other programmers to use and comprehend.
• Everybody who writes software is a designer.
• The best design is the one that allows for the most change in the environment with the least change in the software.
• The ease of maintenance of any piece of software is proportional to the simplicity of its individual pieces.
• Many difficult design problems can be solved by simply drawing or writing them out on paper.
• To handle complexity in your system, redesign the individual pieces in small steps.
• Make it run, make it right, make it fast.
• A method should be a command or a query, but not both. Command modifies the state and doesn’t return value. Query doesn’t modify the state but returns a value.