When did you start programming? What has changed in your programming style and why?
Ask HN: How has your programming style changed over time?
1–4 of 4 posts
Re: Ask HN: How has your programming style changed over time?
#2To name just a few:
- In high school (early 2000's), and through most of college I was mostly writing programs in simple text editors and debugging with print statements. Since then, using IDE's and other more featured editors, and eventually chrome devtools, completely changed that.
- Also in secondary school, my variable names were pretty bad, and even sometimes an intentional joke. Today, I'm pretty verbose in function/var naming.
- Never used to spend time writing useful comments.
Re: Ask HN: How has your programming style changed over time?
#3I write simpler code because it's easier to understand and maintain, for me and coworkers. It took so long to write like one thinks a junior dev would write :-)
Another change is a consequence of being polyglot (mainly Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Elixir now plus some C and PHP.) I can see where language and library designers go out of their way to make things unnecessarily complicated, or where the idiomatic way of a language is stubbornly complex. I try to stay idiomatic because it helps maintenance but I pick simple solutions anytime I can.
Finally, as the other reply states, I got better and more verbose at naming. One good name could be worth 100 words in a comment. It's like placing a big red Stop button in the middle of a dashboard instead of hiding it, small and black, under the desk.
Ah, I write down a lot of things in wikis. Coworkers thank me but they still don't write anything. They're about 10 years younger than me, they'll get there too (to document stuff).
Re: Ask HN: How has your programming style changed over time?
#4In the mid 80s.
The main change, I think, was a vast improvement immediately after reading Refactoring and Clean Code.