Archive for November, 2009
“Understandability is next to godliness.”
“For years, software development was an entire subdivision of badly painted houses.”
“Remember that your code is for a human first and a computer second. Humans need good names. Take note of when you have spent ages trying to do something that would have been easier if a couple of methods had been better named. Good naming is a skill that requires practice; improving this skill is the key to being a truly skillful programmer.”
“Even so the program works. Is this not just an aesthetic judgment, a dislike of ugly code? It is until we want to change the system. The compiler doesn’t care whether the code is ugly or clean. But when we change the system, there is a human involved, and humans do care. A poorly designed system is hard to change. Hard because it is hard to figure out where the changes are needed. If it is hard to figure out what to change, there is a strong chance that the programmer will make a mistake and introduce bugs.”