Clean Code

Listing 5-5 (continued)
WikiPageResponder.java

---

84
Chapter 5: Formatting
Conceptual Affinity. 
Certain bits of code 
want
to be near other bits. They have a certain
conceptual affinity. The stronger that affinity, the
less vertical distance there should be between
them.
As we have seen, this affinity might be based
on a direct dependence, such as one function call-
ing another, or a function using a variable. But
there are other possible causes of affinity. Affinity
might be caused because a group of functions per-
form a similar operation. Consider this snippet of
code from Junit 4.3.1:
public class Assert {
static public void assertTrue(String message, boolean condition) {
if (!condition)
fail(message);
}
static public void assertTrue(boolean condition) {
assertTrue(null, condition);
}
static public void assertFalse(String message, boolean condition) {
assertTrue(message, !condition);
}
static public void assertFalse(boolean condition) {
assertFalse(null, condition);
}
...
These functions have a strong conceptual affinity because they share a common naming
scheme and perform variations of the same basic task. The fact that they call each other is
secondary. Even if they didn’t, they would still want to be close together. 
Vertical Ordering
In general we want function call dependencies to point in the downward direction. That is,
a function that is called should be below a function that does the calling.
2
This creates a
nice flow down the source code module from high level to low level. 
As in newspaper articles, we expect the most important concepts to come first, and
we expect them to be expressed with the least amount of polluting detail. We expect the
low-level details to come last. This allows us to skim source files, getting the gist from the
2.
This is the exact opposite of languages like Pascal, C, and C++ that enforce functions to be defined, or at least declared, 
before
they are used. 

---

85