Take a look at this: Mr. Enfield returned: "But I happen to have noticed his address; he lives in some square or other". "And you never asked about the—place with the door?" Mr. Enfield's reply was: "No, sir; I had a delicacy. I feel very strongly about putting questions; it partakes too much of the style of the day of judgment. You start a question, and it’s like starting a stone. No sir, I make it a rule of mine: - the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask". The lawyer said: "A very good rule, too". Mr. Enfield continued: "But I have studied the place for myself". The pair walked on again for a while in silence and then: "Enfield... That’s a good rule of yours." And this one Mr. Enfield returned: "But I happen to have noticed his address; he lives in some square or other." "And you never asked about the—place with the door?" Mr. Enfield's reply was: "No, sir; I had a delicacy. I feel very strongly about putting questions; it partakes too much of the style of the day of judgment. You start a question, and it’s like starting a stone. No sir, I make it a rule of mine: - the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask." The lawyer said: "A very good rule, too". Mr. Enfield continued: "But I have studied the place for myself". The pair walked on again for a while in silence and then: "Enfield... That’s a good rule of yours." This one: vs this one: The flow: and Now with code. Don’t focus on code semantics, but the visual representation. The first examples, following Clean ABAP preferred rules: and with helper variables: Now applying refactoring – Alt+Shift+R in Eclipse, some names changed: the second with helper variables: Different style examples with incremental indentation: with helper variables: Applying refactoring, names changed: and the second version refactored: The last two images shows why I personally prefer using incremental indentation – no messed up code after renaming. Both styles are readable for me but this the second one without so strict alignment is refactoring-friendly, which is a very important thing for constant improvement of code and naming things correctly. I don’t want to manually correct main code + unit test code + dependent code after each name change (and be sure that everyone in a team remember to “fix” code after his or her refactoring changes). This heavily right-aligned code is also hard to read on smaller screens in editors or webpages like version control systems. Speaking of version control – here are diffs for the Clean ABAP preferred rule, after refactoring I have aligned all things again. ◉ ABAP Git diff (where are my name changes?): ◉ Bitbucket diff: Now incrementally indented code – changes are visible clearly. ◉ ABAP Git diff ◉ Bitbucket diff: Interesting video about this topic by Kevlin Henney (starting around 10-11 minute). The key point from this presentation to me is that keeping the codebase stable after rather trivial refactoring operation is not conforming to a style, but rather to an invariant, a property.
