The Functional Tao of Bash by Garrett Smith

The principles of this talk are illustrated by code examples of BASH, but I think they are general enough to apply to any programming language. The speaker walks you through his own personal thought process and techniques for understanding and refactoring a piece of code which he did not write himself.

I️ found many useful ideas from his own personal techniques that I’d like to try. His overall goal is to make the code easy to understand and comprehend at a glance. He does this by breaking things up into really small function chunks, so you end up with something like:

// Top of file
  DoThing();
  DoAnotherThing();
  DoLastThing();
  
  // Underneath main execution are the declarations
  function DoThing() {...}
  function DoAnotherThing() {...}
  function DoLastThing() {...}
  

I also enjoyed this quote around the ~11:30 mark:

Programming is not a moral debate. We’re not talking about evil and good. We’re talking about a process of programming. “Writing terrible code” is probably a misnomer. That so called “terrible code” is code that is experimental and trying to prove something. That’s fine. Prove it. Understand it. Get it to work. Learn from it. Then make it clearer. Make it better. As needed.