Use the tools available

I've just completed some work on a small project. My success is due, not only to my own talent and hard work, but to the tools that were available to me.

The project was in Ruby, and the tool that assisted me was Rubocop.

Rubocop analyzes Ruby code and reports on questionable (but legal) constructs and syntax. It is, in a phrase, "lint" for Ruby.

Almost all of the major languages have syntax checkers. For C and C++, there is lint. For C# there is FXCop. For Python, PyLint. Even Perl has Perl::Critic and Perl::Lint.

Rubocop helped me, indirectly. I used it as I developed the project. I ran it on the code I was writing, and it reported that certain functions were "too long", according to its default guidelines.

Some programmers would be arrogant and refuse to heed such advice. (Myself at an earlier point in my career, for example.) But with the wisdom of experience, I chose to modify the code and reduce the size of functions. It was an investment.

When I modified the long functions, I broke them into smaller ones. This had the benefit of making duplicate code obvious, as some of the smaller functions performed identical tasks. (The large versions of the functions also performed these identical tasks, but the duplications were not apparent.)

I combined duplicate functions into single functions, and reduced the overall size of the code. I also created abstract classes to hold functions common to concrete derived classes.

The simpler version of the code was, well, simpler. That meant that subsequent changes were easier to implement. In fact, one particular feature had me worried, yet the simpler code made that feature easy to add.

Rubocop helped me simplify the code, which made it easy for me to add new features -- and get them right. Rubocop was a tool, a useful tool.

On your projects, be aware of the tools that can help you.