Michael Parrott

Recently, I read an article about Linus Torvalds "Good Taste" Coding Requirement: https://medium.com/@bartobri/applying-the-linus-tarvolds-good-taste-coding-requirement-99749f37684a#.5h2guheeg

This article struck a chord with me because I have found myself in situations where I've seen code or written code that has been in "bad taste." One question that comes to my mind after reading this is how does someone develop good taste? In my cases, I haven't been able to pinpoint exactly why something was off. In the article, it mentions that The fewer conditions you test for, the better your code tastes. Are there other criteria like this that help you figure this out?

With experience, I'm hoping that I'll be able to put what I think is "good taste" into concrete terms. One way of helping developing this is always thinking how you can make your code better. If you try out different variations of code to accomplish the same thing, there will be some variations that do things better or worse. By trying to evaluate these different pieces of code for things like readability and future maintainability, the ability to write better code in the future should improve.

An example from my own code involves uses Promises. A Promise is "an eventual result of an asynchronous operation". In my code, I had two promises I wanted to resolve. Only 1 or both of the promises need to be executed, depending on some condition for each promise. After all of the desired promises had resolved, a piece of code had to be run. Originally, I solved it doing something like this:

    new Promise(function(resolve, reject) {
      if (cond1) {
        return promise1;
      } else {
        resolve(false);
      }
    }).then((val) => {
      if (val) {
        set some property with val;
      }

      if (cond2) {
        return promise2;
      } else {
        return false;
      }
    }).then((val) => {
      if (val) {
        set some property with val;
      }

      perform ending code;
    });
  

    create empty promise array;

    if (cond1) {
      promise1.then((val) => { set property based on val});
      add to promise array
    }

    if (cond2) {
      promise2.then((val) => { set property based on val });
      add to promise array
    }

    Promise.all(promise array).then(() => {
      perform ending code;
    });