The Object Script Hitchhiker’s Handbook

The Object Script Hitchhiker’s Handbook
Object Script is our core programming language in the InterSystems IRIS environment, it also offers modern features that make it powerful for developers.

for a newcomers, adopting good coding practices from the start is key to writing maintainable, efficient, scalable and clear code, and followed the best practices

This guide outlines essential tips to help “fresh” ObjectScript developers write better code and understand some of the language features.

First things first! use Meaningful Names

Choose descriptive and clear names for variables, classes, and methods

Im thinking a code art is like tell a story about problem and how do you fix it

thinking on the other developers going to debug or read your code

Make sure to depend less on documentation and be meaningful while you write your story, then you free from minor understanding issues on the code

Want an example?

Set patientDOB = "1985-03-12"

// is more understandable than:
Set dob1 = "1985-03-12"

Clear names make the code self-explanatory and just make it easy to read and understand.

Comments are what you need!

Comments help both you and other developers understand the purpose of your code, you can’t just think the ideal developer is sitting in your chair and know exactly what you doing so use comments to simplify a complex logic, describing assumptions, or explaining the goal of a section:

// Calculate patients age from date of birth

avoid commenting on the obvious, spend your energy on complex logics

Make your functions clean and easy to test

Messy functions can make things feel like a blackbox and makes your programs to be huge and full of "spaghetti code”, breaking your logic into small and single-purpose functions makes code easier to maintain, test, and reuse, and don't forget to be generic as much as possible, like just thinking on the edge-cases while you write your code is so important, one function can do many things while a good developer spend some time thinking on edge-cases

Handle Errors with care

Unexpected input, missing data, or runtime issues can break your code if not handled right, validate inputs and always try to use Try/Catch and throw the fit-exception, the way you handle errors can make “bugs” to be friendly and not break the whole logic, just be prepared because bugs happens to everyone.

Don't reinvent the wheel when you don't need to

InterSystems provides many useful %SYS classes for system operations like logging, configuration, and monitoring.

Instead of reinventing features, they wrote white generic attitude so in many cases they can fit exactly for what you need!

Avoid Hardcoding Values

Hardcoded constants make code harder to maintain and every change you made you should change other things so make sure to use parameters or config settings instead just make a declared variables that try to fit to your story

Test Thoroughly

Test your methods with typical, edge, and invalid inputs, make golden tests, and include scenarios such as empty strings, NULL values, and large datasets. 

The idea is to test out edge-cases, it makes your code much more reliable and trusted code so you can just plug-and-play things without the worry of breaking the production

Maintain Consistent Formatting

Object script, just like Java, can be written in many forms, the indentation for every line is less important like other languages (mm.. python) but it's important to use indentation and clear formatting so your code is easy to read.

Well-structured code reduces errors and make the debug feel like walking in park

Final Takeaway

By adopting these best practices early in your Object Script journey, you will write cleaner, safer, and more maintainable code, and obviously you become a better developer, clear names, solid error handling, modular design, and testing discipline will greatly improve both your development speed and the reliability of your code, and don't forgot, those principles are standard while you write code, even in other languages, good coding habits today will save you many hours of debugging tomorrow.