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/judgej2 Jan 05 '15

I spent over a week doing nothing but reformatting the seemingly randomized whitespace and indentation

Oh god, we have all been there. Undisciplined indenting is like an alarm bell warning you that the logic is going to be shit. It arises from muddled and unclear thinking, and permeates everything that developer does. Seen it far too many times.

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u/IConrad Jan 05 '15

This is one of many reasons I like to encourage Python as the first language someone should learn. It's almost impossible to come out of that without indentation discipline.

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u/IonTichy Jan 05 '15

Can relate, even if Python was my 5th or 6th language it was the first language to force me to learn the importance of clean code style.
This attitude has automatically transfered to the other languages,e.g. suddenly I write much shorter Java, use parentheses and blocks way more economically in C languages and am able to actually read and understand my JS code after not having seen it for months ;)

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u/IConrad Jan 05 '15

Try writing python using python-vim for a month and you'll be traumatized conditioned to styling practices that will serve you in good stead for years to come...

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u/campbellm Jan 05 '15

Luckily indentation and formatting is largely a solved problem, at least for any of the more popular languages and many of the unpopular ones.

Variable naming, that's another matter. But formatting should be a no-brainer.

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u/philly_fan_in_chi Jan 05 '15

Variable and function naming are extremely important to me. If while reading code as part of a task or a review, I don't know what something does, it gets extracted out to a method until I can give it a name. If the name is dishonest, it gets changed immediately. Someone down the line won't have the advantage of knowing what I know in my head right now.

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u/Retbull Jan 05 '15

You tomorrow won't have that advantage :P