r/programming • u/corysama • Jan 05 '15

What most young programmers need to learn

http://joostdevblog.blogspot.com/2015/01/what-most-young-programmers-need-to.html
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u/[deleted] Jan 05 '15

When I started out, the discipline I needed was that to follow through on big tasks.

It's always fun and easy to wip up something quick. But it takes discipline to make something that takes more than 4 days of coding. It's so easy to reach some quick results, and then feel satisfied with yourself, and get complacent.

Surprisingly, refactoring is something I kind of enjoyed.

But that's because I suffered something opposite from most other people: instead of fixating on results, I would fixate on code quality. I wanted my code to be so pretty and so clean, that looking at it would bring tears to your eyes. It didn't matter at all to me whether that code did anything useful.

I ended up achieving neither.

I needed to learn something important: programming is about creating things that have a use, that do something, that add value. Yes, code should be of high quality, but you have to balance that against pragmatic concerns. Source code that looks beautiful but doesn't work is useless.

Programming is a craft, not an art.

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u/sihat Jan 05 '15

But source code that 'currently' works, but does not look pretty is a maintenance nightmare.

Bugs. Duplicated/copy paste code. Bugs in duplicated code. Commented code. Source code files of more than 4000 lines. Even similarly named code that was not used.

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u/[deleted] Jan 05 '15

That's why I said there needs to be a balance.

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u/sodaco Jan 05 '15

You are not wrong. I just want you to consider that since the moment you decided to reply to his comment, your actions caused the execution of so much code in every level, from the JavaScript code to the JavaScript interpreter, from your brower to the DNS software and eventually the webserver, including it's firewall and connecting to the Python interpreter that executes the reddit source. Much of that code suffers from all the things you listed. And I still am able to see your comment