Are You Proud of Your Code?
Found on Slashdot on Sunday, 09 December 2007
I am downright embarrassed by the quality of my code. It is buggy, slow, fragile, and a nightmare to maintain. Do you feel the same way? If so, then what is holding you back from realizing your full potential? More importantly, what if anything are you planning to do about it?
Sadly the one constant in my career is that I am assigned to projects that drift, seemingly aimlessly, from inception to a point where the client runs out of funding. Have any developers here successfully lobbied their company to stop or cut back on 'cowboy coding' and adopt best practices?
Less proud, more afraid. I don't comment my code, because when I'm writing, I don't feel like doing so and afterwards, I'm too lazy to do it. I've ran into old code of mine and spent several minutes trying to figure out why it works. I wouldn't call my code messy or sloppy; especially Perl lets you do that, but "use strict;" and "use warnings;" helps you keep things cleaner. Always pay attention to errors and warnings, don't ignore them because your code "still runs fine".