As a first post in the Best Practices Gone Bad series, I figured I would take an simple example from a previous job. An Example In that position, there were two best practices that intersected to generate unreadable code. The first practice was expressive names. All names of variables, classes, and methods were required to… Read More »
In the last post (Coding Style: Terse vs Verbose), I laid out some of the arguments for and against a verbose coding style and a terse coding style. Although, I didn’t delve deeply into what I meant by these styles, I hoped the details were less important than the general feel. However, by the end… Read More »
One coding style issues that causes many arguments is the distinction between the Terse/Elegant/Succinct style and the Verbose/Legible/Debuggable style. As usual, each side explains that their style is the only rational choice and that the other approach is obviously wrong. First, let’s look at the two styles to see what they say. In order to… Read More »
My wife is a really good writer and she once gave me a great piece of advice for some documentation I was working on: Know Your Audience. This has helped me to write better documentation. Over the years, I have come to realize that the same advice applies when writing code. Who is the Audience… Read More »
In my last post (Thoughts on Code Comments), I described two opposing camps that argue about code comments. Like much of the craft of programming, the commenting of code is too complicated for a simple set of rules. In this post, I will describe a set of guidelines that I’ve adopted over the years. These… Read More »
In the comments on a recent Google+ post, a discussion erupted about comments in source code. As usual, there were two groups that argued relatively vehemently. The More Comments camp was best represented by the suggestion that a good program should have as many lines of comments as lines of code. The Clear Code Needs… Read More »
C++ Coding Standards Herb Sutter and Andrei Alexandrescu Addison-Wesley, 2005 For many programmers, the term coding standard generates a gut-level response. We all know that someone is going to be pushing the one, true brace style or the proper way to indent code. This subject is probably the best way to generate instantaneous rebellion among… Read More »
At different times in the past I’ve either agreed with or fought the application of coding standards. Recently, I’ve been looking at the subject again. In a wonderful case of timing I stumbled across an ad in CUJ (10/2004) for CodingStandard.Com. They have a coding standard for C++ that seems to cover much of what… Read More »