Code as prose

I recently started reading Clean Code - and immediately felt guilty for not reading it earlier. In the first few pages Grady Booch suggests that clean code should read like prose. If we take this a little further use an analogy where the code of an application could be thought of as a book we could then ask the question: 'How would the the shelves of our local bookshop appear?' Their contents would surely reflect the current state and quality of IT projects at large.

Personally I think there would be a fair few fine works of prose and many of those you could take home for free. However, the majority of those shelves would be chock full of vaguely similar children's colouring-in books that have been carelessly scribbled in. Markings from the 'crayon of implementation' would wildly stray over the clear and purposeful black outlines of original intent.

Flickr is surprisingly devoid of badly executed 'colouring-ins' but has no shortage of perfectly filled pages from such books - perhaps this is yet another example of sunlight being the best disinfectant.