Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns

by Kent Beck

Some of the biggest improvements come from figuring out how to eliminate: • Duplicate code (even little bits of it) • Conditional logic • Complex methods • Structural code (where one object treats another as a data structure)

the bottlenecks throughout development come from limitations in human communication.

Lots of little pieces—Good code invariably has small methods and small objects.

I get lots of resistance to this idea, especially from experienced developers, but no one thing I do to systems provides as much help as breaking it into more pieces.

Methods without temporary variables are easier to understand than methods with temporary variables.