Cleanliness is next to…well, something

At a past company I used to debate the merits of various software engineering techniques with my coworkers. (When someone touched a header that was precompiled we had plenty of time to do this - our product could take hours to rebuild under Visual Studio, which I think spoke against at least certain practices, but that’s another post.) We were very focused on shipping product and helping the company’s business, so the question was: does this practice really make money or does it just make engineers happy.

One thing we’d debate was whether writing clean looking code was worth anything…certainly the compiler doesn’t care if your code looks like this:

void light_mgr::prep_lighting_state(light_type in_type, float in_coords[3])
{
if (settings_mgr::use_slow_lights())
setup_textured_lights (in_type );
else
setup_untextured_lights(in_type );

set_light_ref (in_coords);
}

or this

void light_mgr::PrepLightingState(light_type t,
//async_mgr* /*fMgr*/,
// JJ - removed 4/10/02 float coo[3])
{
#if USING_NEW_LIGHTS
if (settings_mgr::use_slow_lights() && USING_NEW_LIGHTS)
setup_textured_lights(t);
#else
setup_textured_lights(2);
#endif
else
/ * Setup_untextured_lights(10);*/
Setup_untextured_lights(t);

SetLightRef(NULL); // COORDS);
}

At the time I was at least partly convinced that us software engineers tried to make things cleaner than was needed for the bottom line of the company because it’s more pleasant to work on the top code than the bottom, which gives you that warm moist feeling of wading through a swamp. I still do think as I did then that programmers are able to work in less-than-optimal code environments.

I’ve been working with Laminar Research for a while now. One thing Austin insists on is scrubbing the code base regularly. He would never leave code like the lower example in the sim. And I think there is a real benefit: ergonomics.

As programmers we sit in front of the computer screen and concentrate on code all day. I can’t speak for other programmers, but for me at least I am often bounded by concentration - that is, how long can I keep focused on many small diverse details so that the code I write is correct the first time? The answer is…a pretty long time but not forever.

To this end I think there is a benefit from keeping the code clean: I’d rather be spending my mental energy on the work at hand than on the mental translation from the lower to upper code snippet every time I look at it. I find that working on X-Plane is less tiring than other code bases I’ve looked at, and I think that that’s partly because we sweep the cruft out regularly.