A Million Lines of Bad Code
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A Million Lines of Bad Code
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Re: A Million Lines of Bad Code
#2Thought his was talking about win95 or win98...
Re: A Million Lines of Bad Code
#3You have to have thick skin in the programming industry. Because you're surrounded by what might be the world's worst communicators, programmers. We can tell the machine exactly what to do, but our social IQs tend to suffer on the whole.
Re: A Million Lines of Bad Code
#4I'd hate to see my old VB4 code I wrote back in the day. I'm sure I did worse, except at the time I thought I was a rock-star. Of course it was the late 90's and everyone who had a compsci degree was a bad-ass developer no matter what language you used or how many bad lines of code you wrote.
Re: A Million Lines of Bad Code
#5> Building a string with a series of concatenations like this is extremely inefficient
No. Not in Java since 1999 or so.
Re: A Million Lines of Bad Code
#6I recently read the book "How to Win Friends & Influence People", bad title great book. My main take away from this is I've been talking to people really badly for the last 27 years. I wish I had read this book in middle school.
But this blog reminded me of some of the concepts from the book, its far more productive to give positive encouragement than to give negative feedback, and just adding a complement isn't enough if you follow it with a "but".
"Hey pretty cool program! Its a great start. I bet we can make it run faster if we changed the way files are imported to something like this... nice work"
will get better results then this
"Hey pretty cool program, but you're reading in files wrong"
which even that is better than this
"You're reading in files completely wrong, try googling for a better solution" which unfortunately among engineers seems to be the most common reply.
Re: A Million Lines of Bad Code
#7That's all true, but the cartoon is still funny!
Re: A Million Lines of Bad Code
#8Thought his was talking about win95 or win98...
Windows ME? In all seriousness I've witnessed people shame over bad code, yet later when other people looked at their code was just was bad. We all write bad code, hopefully we're able to make it less bad the more we write it.
Re: A Million Lines of Bad Code
#9You have to have thick skin in the programming industry. Because you're surrounded by what might be the world's worst communicators, programmers. We can tell the machine exactly what to do, but our social IQs tend to suffer on the whole.
Not to mention we're told from a very early age how smart we are so inevitably we begin to not only believe it but also believe we're smarter than everyone else.
Here's a hard-earned lesson for any newly-minted developers out there: Yeah, you're smart. But not as smart as you think you are. And regardless, it doesn't give you license to treat anyone poorly.
Re: A Million Lines of Bad Code
#10I recently read the book "How to Win Friends & Influence People", bad title great book. My main take away from this is I've been talking to people really badly for the last 27 years. I wish I had read this book in middle school. But this blog reminded me of some of the concepts from the book, its far more productive to give positive encouragement than to give negative feedback, and just adding a complement isn't enou…
"Hey pretty cool program! Its a great start. I bet we can make it run faster if we changed the way files are imported to something like this... nice work"
I usually hear this referred to as a "criticism sandwich": Criticism surrounded on either side with compliments.