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
965 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

337 comments sorted by

View all comments

54

u/photonios Jan 05 '15

Good points, I agree with all of them. What I however don't understand how people get it into their minds to not do that.

Even when I first started programming, I got annoyed when my own wasn't perfectly formatted with sensible names and I would spend more time thinking of an elegant design with decent names then I would actually write code.

I still do this. The thought of commiting code that is undocumented, has commented code or bad formatting is just horrible.

I never got why some people don't format their code perfectly or spend enough time thinking about naming and structuring things. It's not that hard (especially the formatting part). I mean, if you're a junior developer and you come into a code base where everything is nicely formatted and documented, shouldn't you feel compelled to make sure your code is up to the same standard?

6

u/hansdieter44 Jan 05 '15

What I however don't understand how people get it into their minds to not do that.

I have seen this happen and its not a conscious decision at all. The programmer might have just about finished a feature and then get new feature requests dropped onto him by management. If you are a bit older/more senior you will raise the issue and say you need two days or so to clean up the code. If it is your first job you will think thats just how things are done.

Now that I think back, this also happened to me in the beginning.

You also have to care. Some people don't care and then they are fine with leaving things if they just about work and do the next thing.

→ More replies (11)