Best Coding Practices

Within these castle walls be forged Mavens of Computer Science ...

— Merlin, The Coder

Best Practice

👍 #261

Flowcharts are your friend

Best Practice

👍 #657

Use appropriate capitalization

• Names of types and protocols are UpperCamelCase (Pascal case)
• Everything else is lowerCamelCase

Best Practice

👍 #359

Clarity is more important than brevity

Best Practice

👍 #563

Preconditions are your friend

• Include sufficient information for the message to be useful

Best Practice

👍 #174

Great functions exhibit these three vital properties:

• Easy to read and comprehend
• Easy to debug
• Easy to modify to solve a variation of the original task

• No global variables
• Appropriate capitalization
• Appropriate and descriptive variable names
  • nouns are usually most appropriate
• Appropriate and descriptive function names
  • verbs are usually most appropriate
• Appropriate use of functions
  • In general, avoid mid-function exits
• Avoid repetition
  • DRY: Do Not Repeat Yourself
  • DIE: Duplication is Evil
• Appropriate scoping
  • Scope is no wider than absolutely necessary
• Appropriate loops
  • Correct loop type
  • In general, avoid mid-loop exits
• Appropriate indentation
• Helpful whitespace
• Appropriate placement of closing braces and parentheses
• Deliberate and helpful comments
  • Avoid "obvious" comments
• Avoid deep nesting
• Avoid inappropriate nesting of functions
• Limit line length
• Appropriate file organization
  • Generally one class per file
• Code is clear and concise

References

• API Design Guidelines (Swift Documentation)
• API Style Guidelines (Google Documentation)