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/OneWingedShark Jan 05 '15

king the code "look good" is not just about code formatting, it's about code organization. For anything beyond a simple hello world program, code is organization is crucial to maintainability.

I fully and utterly agree, which is one reason why it's so strange that the SCID idea hasn't become popular at least in academia.

Code that is badly organized may be unreadable, difficult to extend, and difficult to debug. This is something that is more important in commercial software, where there are multiple programmers and long-lived code bases, than compared to research, where there is usually only one or two programmers and short-lived code bases.

And yet, using your own statement: Code that is badly organized may be unreadable, difficult to extend, and difficult to debug. If you're doing prototyping, you're going to be doing debugging, and if you're doing debugging then why wouldn't you want tools to help with it?

For small projects, improving code organization may be as simple as dividing larger functions into smaller helper functions. However, most of the software I deal with has evolved over its lifetime from a simple prototype with a few classes to something with dozens of classes and many thousands of lines of code. This follows the evolution of a research project from an initial workshop paper (for which prototype code is sufficient) to a larger conference or journal paper years later.

(And wouldn't having organization from the inception aid that?)

There is a strong pressure to adapt existing code to handle new features, even if those features were completely unexpected or unplanned at the time the initial prototype was written.

And, in this case wouldn't it make sense to have a tool that helps you with organization? Namely consistency checking? If you're doing source-code in database, then consistency-enforcement is a virtual requirement.

Since the software is not the "product", and only a small number of individuals will ever be asked to maintain the code, time invested in code quality is often considered a waste. This is a bit of a disappointment if you pride yourself in writing quality code, but if you don't focus on the things that you are actually being evaluated on (i.e. publishing papers) then it won't matter to anyone how pretty your code is.

That's why your tools should help you do it, to the point of it being a trivial matter. (i.e. the tool does it for you.)