Ask HN: How’d you go from a noodler to writing large well structured programs?

The Pragmatic Programmer, by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, is a fairly slim book that aims to cover the unwritten knowledge that experienced programmers have. It came out a long time ago, but it's one of those timeless classics. If you can read this book and everything in it seems obvious, you are probably the equivalent of an intermediate-level software developer.

Similarly, Code Complete, by Steve McConnell, explains how to think like a project lead. In contrast to The Pragmatic Programmer, this is a large book: it aims to cover many concerns. Again, the less that you know, the more value that you will get from it: if you are starting with no training in programming, this book could be immensely valuable.

The structure of a program gets really bad when you continue to pile more and more code on a bad architecture.

Refactor early, refactor often - get to the point where you are comfortable with modifying large chunks. Of course that means you have enough test frameworks at every level.

Matlab as a language itself is more of a laboratory language, convenient for playing with math and quickly prototyping things.

As a language that can scale to dozens of thousands of lines, it is poorly suited.

You definitely need a senior programmer in your team, else it will soon turn into a nightmare.

Design from the top down; implement from the bottom up.

Write no subroutine longer than about 50-60 lines. Back in the day, that was a single printed page. We used listings because we didn’t have giant monitors.

Define a specific and single purpose for any given subroutine. Name it to match it’s purpose.

Don’t repeat yourself; got the same code in two places? Make it a subroutine.

If you don’t want to dive into git or other version control, use Time Machine or Dropbox to enable you to review what worked last week or last month.

Also, understand the worth of this code to your organization. 15k lines shouldn’t take a seasoned developer more than a few weeks to understand and refactor. If this code isn’t worth the $20k a good consultant would charge to fix it, then muddling through would appear to be part of your job description. There’s nothing wrong with slugging it out when economics dictate it.