Avoid Code Comments by Refactoring JavaScript | Clean Code Tutorial

Key Takeaways

what we're looking at here is a function to return all of the longest strings from an array that has strings in it so if there's the longest one is ten characters we're gonna turn all the ten character words that's in that string array i actually wrote this when i was learning to code about six seven years ago which really makes me feel kind of old and how time flies but that's a separate story now what we're going to do right now is utilize some of the variable names and the function names to eliminate some of these comments and have a more readable code base so it's going to be some good practice so let's eliminate some comments that really we don't need now let's talk about start from the top and work our way down if you have to leave a comment for what a function does oftentimes you have a very poor name or the function is too large in this case this is a fairly small function so i think our name is actually incorrect and longest string sounds singular we're not returning the longest string we're returning longest strings and because it's a git and we want to standardize our calls maybe a better name here would be get longest strings we know it's returning something we know it's returning the longest of something and we know it's returning plural here hence the plural now here initialize the long string to the first value we don't really need this initialize but this variable name here let length length could be anything length is a very generic name would be a better name maybe longest word length because that's what we're going to use it for down below we're going to have this placeholder variable that we're going to go and set for anywhere that gets updated so let's go ahead and make those changes real quick now that we have that we have this other comment checks if current string is longer than the current longest is this an overly convoluted if statement to me this looks like a very singular purpose it's very straightforward is the longest word length less than the current word length i don't think this needs a comment this is a perfect example of something that doesn't need a comment right this reads very clearly we set the longest word length we compare the longest word length in a for loop this shouldn't be something that needs to be commented i understand if it's your first programming class but down the road not so much now same thing here is this filtering yeah filter take our array filter it's the word.length equals the longest word length we don't really need that now where we can make an improvement is strs that's sort of generic what about longest words so what we've done here is we've eliminated comments that we now have to maintain there that we had to maintain we eliminate some comments that really didn't really have any other purpose to describe this if statements very straightforward very simple and we updated our variable names and our functions names to be more readable and now we have less code we have to maintain in my opinion it's more readable and we've simply applied the function and variable naming to our better comments which in this case is actually removing a lot of comments let's go ahead and look at some other examples