What s your most controversial programming opinion

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This is definitely subjective  but I d like to try to avoid it becoming argumentative  I think it could be an interesting question if people treat it appropriately   The idea for this question came from the comment thread from my answer to the  What are five things you hate about your favorite language   question  I contended that classes in C  should be sealed by default - I won t put my reasoning in the question  but I might write a fuller explanation as an answer to this question  I was surprised at the heat of the discussion in the comments  25 comments currently    So  what contentious opinions do you hold  I d rather avoid the kind of thing which ends up being pretty religious with relatively little basis  e g  brace placing  but examples might include things like  unit testing isn t actually terribly helpful  or  public fields are okay really   The important thing  to me  anyway  is that you ve got reasons behind your opinions   Please present your opinion and reasoning - I would encourage people to vote for opinions which are well-argued and interesting  whether or not you happen to agree with them

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Most consulting programmers suck and should not be allowed to write production code   IMHO-Probably about 60  or more

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Inheritance is evil and should be deprecated   The truth is aggregation is better in all cases  Static typed OOP languages can t avoid inheritance  it s the only way to describe what method wants from a type  But dynamic languages and duck typing can live without it  Ruby mixins is much more powerful then inheritance and a lot more controllable

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Copy Paste IS the root of all evil

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Not everything needs to be encapsulated into its own method  Some times it is ok to have a method do more then one thing

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According to the amount of feedback I ve gotten  my most controversial opinion  apparently  is that programmers don t always read the books they claim to have read   This is followed closely by my opinion that a programmer with a formal education is better than the same programmer who is self-taught  but not necessarily better than a different programmer who is self-taught

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Not all programmers are created equal  Quite often managers think that DeveloperA    DeveloperB simply because they have same level of experience and so on  In actual fact  the performance of one developer can be 10x or even 100x that of another   It s politically risky to talk about it  but sometimes I feel like pointing out that  even though several team members may appear to be of equal skill  it s not always the case  I have even seen cases where lead developers were  beyond hope  and junior devs did all the actual work - I made sure they got the credit  though

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Opinion  Data driven design puts the cart before the horse  It should be eliminated from our thinking forthwith   The vast majority of software isn t about the data  it s about the business problem we re trying to solve for our customers  It s about a problem domain  which involves objects  rules  flows  cases  and relationships    When we start our design with the data  and model the rest of the system after the data and the relationships between the data  tables  foreign keys  and x-to-x relationships   we constrain the entire application to how the data is stored in and retrieved from the database  Further  we expose the database architecture to the software   The database schema is an implementation detail  We should be free to change it without having to significantly alter the design of our software at all  The business layer should never have to know how the tables are set up  or if it s pulling from a view or a table  or getting the table from dynamic SQL or a stored procedure  And that type of code should never appear in the presentation layer   Software is about solving business problems  We deal with users  cars  accounts  balances  averages  summaries  transfers  animals  messsages  packages  carts  orders  and all sorts of other real tangible objects  and the actions we can perform on them  We need to save  load  update  find  and delete those items as needed  Sometimes  we have to do those things in special ways    But there s no real compelling reason that we should take the work that should be done in the database and move it away from the data and put it in the source code  potentially on a separate machine  introducing network traffic and degrading performance   Doing so means turning our backs on the decades of work that has already been done to improve the performance of stored procedures and functions built into databases  The argument that stored procedures introduce  yet another API  to be manged is specious  of course it does  that API is a facade that shields you from the database schema  including the intricate details of primary and foreign keys  transactions  cursors  and so on  and it prevents you from having to splice SQL together in your source code   Put the horse back in front of the cart  Think about the problem domain  and design the solution around it  Then  derive the data from the problem domain

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You must know how to type to be a programmer   It s controversial among people who don t know how to type  but who insist that they can two-finger hunt-and-peck as fast as any typist  or that they don t really need to spend that much time typing  or that Intellisense relieves the need to type     I ve never met anyone who does know how to type  but insists that it doesn t make a difference   See also   Programming s Dirtiest Little Secret

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Null references should be removed from OO languages  Coming from a Java and C  background  where its normal to return null from a method to indicate a failure  I ve come to conclude that nulls cause a lot of avoidable problems  Language designers can remove a whole class of errors relate to NullRefernceExceptions if they simply eliminate null references from code   Additionally  when I call a method  I have no way of knowing whether that method can return null references unless I actually dig in the implementation  I d like to see more languages follow F  s model for handling nulls  F  doesn t allow programmers to return null references  at least for classes compiled in F    instead it requires programmers to represent empty objects using option types  The nice thing about this design is how useful information  such as whether a function can return null references  is propagated through the type system  functions which return a type  a have a different return type than functions which return  a option

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Every developer should spend several weeks  or even months  developing paper-based systems before they start building electronic ones  They should also then be forced to use their systems   Developing a good paper-based system is hard work  It forces you to take into account human nature  cumbersome processes get ignored  ones that are too complex tend to break down   and teaches you to appreciate the value of simplicity  new work goes in this tray  work for QA goes in this tray  archiving goes in this box    Once you ve worked out how to build a system on paper  it s often a lot easier to build an effective computer system - one that people will actually want to  and be able to  use   The systems we develop are not manned by an army of perfectly-trained automata  real people use them  real people who are trained by managers who are also real people and have far too little time to waste training them how to jump through your hoops   In fact  for my second point   Every developer should be required to run an interactive training course to show users how to use their software

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Opinion  Data driven design puts the cart before the horse  It should be eliminated from our thinking forthwith   The vast majority of software isn t about the data  it s about the business problem we re trying to solve for our customers  It s about a problem domain  which involves objects  rules  flows  cases  and relationships    When we start our design with the data  and model the rest of the system after the data and the relationships between the data  tables  foreign keys  and x-to-x relationships   we constrain the entire application to how the data is stored in and retrieved from the database  Further  we expose the database architecture to the software   The database schema is an implementation detail  We should be free to change it without having to significantly alter the design of our software at all  The business layer should never have to know how the tables are set up  or if it s pulling from a view or a table  or getting the table from dynamic SQL or a stored procedure  And that type of code should never appear in the presentation layer   Software is about solving business problems  We deal with users  cars  accounts  balances  averages  summaries  transfers  animals  messsages  packages  carts  orders  and all sorts of other real tangible objects  and the actions we can perform on them  We need to save  load  update  find  and delete those items as needed  Sometimes  we have to do those things in special ways    But there s no real compelling reason that we should take the work that should be done in the database and move it away from the data and put it in the source code  potentially on a separate machine  introducing network traffic and degrading performance   Doing so means turning our backs on the decades of work that has already been done to improve the performance of stored procedures and functions built into databases  The argument that stored procedures introduce  yet another API  to be manged is specious  of course it does  that API is a facade that shields you from the database schema  including the intricate details of primary and foreign keys  transactions  cursors  and so on  and it prevents you from having to splice SQL together in your source code   Put the horse back in front of the cart  Think about the problem domain  and design the solution around it  Then  derive the data from the problem domain

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Less code is better than more   If the users say  that s it    and your work remains invisible  it s done right   Glory can be found elsewhere

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We re software developers  not C C  C   PHP Perl Python Java     developers   After you ve been exposed to a few languages  picking up a new one and being productive with it is a small task   That is to say that you shouldn t be afraid of new languages   Of course  there is a large difference between being productive and mastering a language   But  that s no reason to shy away from a language you ve never seen   It bugs me when people say   I m a PHP developer   or when a job offer says   Java developer    After a few years experience of being a developer  new languages and APIs really shouldn t be intimidating and going from never seeing a language to being productive with it shouldn t take very long at all   I know this is controversial but it s my opinion

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Any sufficiently capable library is too complicated to be useable and any library simple enough to be usable lacks that capabilities needed to be a good general solution   I run in to this constantly   Exhaustive libraries that are so complicated to use I tear my hair out and simple easy to use libraries that don t quite do what I need them to do

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There s an awful lot of bad teaching out there   We developers like to feel smugly superior when Joel says there s a part of the brain for understanding pointers that some people are just born without  The topics many of us discuss here and are passionate about are esoteric  but sometimes that s only because we make them so

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Stay away from Celko      http   www dbdebunk com page page 857309 htm  I think it makes a lot more sense to use surrogate primary keys then  natural  primary keys      ocdecio  Fabian Pascal gives  in chapter 3 of his book Practical issues in database management  cited in point 3 at the page that you link  as one of the criteria for choosing a key that of stability  it always exists and doesn t change   When a natural key does not possesses such property  than a surrogate key must be used  for evident reasons  to which you hint in comments   You don t know what he wrote and you have not bothered to check  otherwise you could discover that you actually agree with him  Nothing controversial there  he was saying  don t be dogmatic  adapt general guidelines to circumstances  and  above all  think  use your brain instead of a dogmatic cookbook words-of-guru approach

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I also think there s nothing wrong with having binaries in source control   if there is a good reason for it   If I have an assembly I don t have the source for  and might not necessarily be in the same place on each devs machine  then I will usually stick it in a  binaries  directory and reference it in a project using a relative path     Quite a lot of people seem to think I should be burned at the stake for even mentioning  source control  and  binary  in the same sentence   I even know of places that have strict rules saying you can t add them

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You don t always need a database   If you need to store less than a few thousand  things  and you don t need locking  flat files can work and are better in a lot of ways  They are more portable  and you can hand edit them in a pinch  If you have proper separation between your data and business logic  you can easily replace the flat files with a database if your app ever needs it  And if you design it with this in mind  it reminds you to have proper separation between your data and business logic   -- bmb

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Although I m in full favor of Test-Driven Development  TDD   I think there s a vital step before developers even start the full development cycle of prototyping a solution to the problem   We too often get caught up trying to follow our TDD practices for a solution that may be misdirected because we don t know the domain well enough  Simple prototypes can often elucidate these problems   Prototypes are great because you can quickly churn through and throw away more code than when you re writing tests first  sometimes   You can then begin the development process with a blank slate but a better understanding

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Generated documentation is nearly always totally worthless   Or  as a corollary  Your API needs separate sets of documentation for maintainers and users   There are really two classes of people who need to understand your API  maintainers  who must understand the minutiae of your implementation to be effective at their job  and users  who need a high-level overview  examples  and thorough details about the effects of each method they have access to   I have never encountered generated documentation that succeeded in either area   Generally  when programmers write comments for tools to extract and make documentation out of  they aim for somewhere in the middle--just enough implementation detail to bore and confuse users yet not enough to significantly help maintainers  and not enough overview to be of any real assistance to users   As a maintainer  I d always rather have clean  clear comments  unmuddled by whatever strange markup your auto-doc tool requires  that tell me why you wrote that weird switch statement the way you did  or what bug this seemingly-redundant parameter check fixes  or whatever else I need to know to actually keep the code clean and bug-free as I work on it   I want this information right there in the code  adjacent to the code it s about  so I don t have to hunt down your website to find it in a state that lends itself to being read   As a user  I d always rather have a thorough  well-organized document  a set of web pages would be ideal  but I d settle for a well-structured text file  too  telling me how your API is architectured  what methods do what  and how I can accomplish what I want to use your API to do   I don t want to see internally what classes you wrote to allow me to do work  or files they re in for that matter   And I certainly don t want to have to download your source so I can figure out exactly what s going on behind the curtain   If your documentation were good enough  I wouldn t have to   That s how I see it  anyway

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Explicit self in Python s method declarations is poor design choice  Method calls got syntactic sugar  but declarations didn t  It s a leaky abstraction  by design   that causes annoying errors  including runtime errors with apparent off-by-one error in reported number of arguments

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All project managers should be required to have coding tasks  In teams that I have worked where the project manager was actually a programmer who understood the technical issues of the code well enough to accomplish coding tasks  the decisions that were made lacked the communication disconnect that often happens in teams where the project manager is not involved in the code

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You don t always need a database   If you need to store less than a few thousand  things  and you don t need locking  flat files can work and are better in a lot of ways  They are more portable  and you can hand edit them in a pinch  If you have proper separation between your data and business logic  you can easily replace the flat files with a database if your app ever needs it  And if you design it with this in mind  it reminds you to have proper separation between your data and business logic   -- bmb

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It is OK to use short variable names  But not for indices in nested loops

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Avoid indentation    Use early returns  continues or breaks   instead of   if  passed    NULL       for x in list             if  peter                    print  peter             more code                                          else                   print  no peter                     do   if  pPassed  NULL      return false   for x in list       if   peter              print  no peter           continue           print  peter      more code

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As there are hundreds of answers to this mine will probably end up unread  but here s my pet peeve anyway   If you re a programmer then you re most likely awful at Web Design Development  This website is a phenomenal resource for programmers  but an absolutely awful place to come if you re looking for XHTML CSS help  Even the good Web Developers here are handing out links to resources that were good in the 90 s   Sure  XHTML and CSS are simple to learn  However  you re not just learning a language  You re learning how to use it well  and very few designers and developers can do that  let alone programmers  It took me ages to become a capable designer and even longer to become a good developer  I could code in HTML from the age of 10 but that didn t mean I was good  Now I am a capable designer in programs like Photoshop and Illustrator  I am perfectly able to write a good website in Notepad and am able to write basic scripts in several languages  Not only that but I have a good nose for Search Engine Optimisation techniques and can easily tell you where the majority of people are going wrong  hint  get some good content      Also  this place is a terrible resource for advice on web standards  You should NOT just write code to work in the different browsers  You should ALWAYS follow the standard to future-proof your code  More often than not the fixes you use on your websites will break when the next browser update comes along  Not only that but the good browsers follow standards anyway  Finally  the reason IE was allowed to ruin the Internet was because YOU allowed it by coding your websites for IE  If you re going to continue to do that for Firefox then we ll lose out yet again   If you think that table-based layouts are as good  if not better than CSS layouts then you should not be allowed to talk on the subject  at least without me shooting you down first  Also  if you think W3Schools is the best resource to send someone to then you re just plain wrong   If you re new to Web Design Development don t bother with this place  it s full of programmers  not web developers   Go to a good Web Design Development community like SitePoint

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Useful and clean high-level abstractions are significantly more important than performance  one example   Too often I watch peers spending hours writing over complicated Sprocs  or massive LINQ queries which return unintuitive anonymous types for the sake of  performance    They could achieve almost the same performance but with considerably cleaner  intuitive code

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Apparently it is controversial that IDE s should check to see whether they can link up the code they create before wasting time compiling   But I m of the opinion that I shouldn t compile a zillion lines of code only to realize that Windows has a lock on the file I m trying to create because another programmer has some weird threading issue that requires him to Delay Unloading DLLs for 3 minutes after they aren t supposed to be used

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Dependency Management Software Does More Harm Than Good  I ve worked on Java projects that included upwards of a hundred different libraries  In most cases  each library has its own dependencies  and those dependent libraries have their own dependencies too   Software like Maven or Ivy supposedly  manage  this problem by automatically fetching the correct version of each library and then recursively fetching all of its dependencies   Problem solved  right   Wrong   Downloading libraries is the easy part of dependency management  The hard part is creating a mental model of the software  and how it interacts with all those libraries   My unpopular opinion is this   If you can t verbally explain  off the top of your head  the basic interactions between all the libraries in your project  you should eliminate dependencies until you can   Along the same lines  if it takes you longer than ten seconds to list all of the libraries  and their methods  invoked either directly or indirectly from one of your functions  then you are doing a poor job of managing dependencies   You should be able to easily answer the question  which parts of my application actually depend on library XYZ    The current crop of dependency management tools do more harm than good  because they make it easy to create impossibly-complicated dependency graphs  and they provide virtually no functionality for reducing dependencies or identifying problems   I ve seen developers include 10 or 20 MB worth of libraries  introducing thousands of dependent classes into the project  just to eliminate a few dozen lines of simple custom code   Using libraries and frameworks can be good  But there s always a cost  and tools which obscure that cost are inherently problematic   Moreover  it s sometimes  note  certainly not always  better to reinvent the wheel by writing a few small classes that implement exactly what you need than to introduce a dependency on a large general-purpose library

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SQL could and should have been done better   Because its original spec was limited  various venders have been extending the language in different directions for years   SQL that is written for MS-SQL is different than SQL for Oracle  IBM  MySQL  Sybase  etc   Other serious languages  take C   for example  were carefully standardized so that C   written under one compiler will generally compile unmodified under another   Why couldn t SQL have been designed and standardized better   HTML was a seriously broken choice as a browser display language   We ve spent years extending it through CSS  XHTML  Javascript  Ajax  Flash  etc  in order to make a useable UI  and the result is still not as good as your basic thick-client windows app   Plus  a competent web programmer now needs to know three or four languages in order to make a decent UI   Oh yeah   Hungarian notation is an abomination

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Variable Names With Bloody Underscores  or even worse  CAPITALIZED VARIABLE NAMES WITH BLOODY UNDERSCORES  should be globally expunged    with prejudice  CamelCapsAreJustFine   Glolbal constants not withstanding   GOTO statements are for use by developers under the age of 11  Any language that does not support pointers is not worthy of the name   Net    Bloat The finest example of microsoft s efforts for web site development  Expressionless Web 2  is the finest example of slow bloated cr pw re ever written   try Web Studio instead   Response  OK well let me address the Underscore issue a little  From the C link you provided   -Global constants should be all caps with     separators   This I actually agree with because it is so BLOODY OBVIOUS  -Take for example NetworkABCKey  Notice how the C from ABC and K from key are confused  Some people don t mind this and others just hate it so you ll find different policies in different code so you never know what to call something    I fall into the former category  I choose names VERY carefully and if you cannot figure out in one glance that the K belongs to Key then english is probably not your first language    C Function Names   In a C   project there should be very few C functions  For C functions use the GNU convention of all lower case letters with     as the word delimiter      Justification    It makes C functions very different from any C   related names     Example  int    some bloody function              These  standards  and conventions are simply the arbitrary decisions handed down through time  I think that while they make a certain amount of logical sense  They clutter up code and make something that should be short and sweet to read  clumsy  long winded and cluttered   C has been adopted as the de-facto standard  not because it is friendly  but because it is pervasive  I can write 100 lines of C code in 20 with a syntactically friendly high level language   This makes the program flow easy to read  and as we all know  revisiting code after a year or more means following the breadcrumb trail all over the place    I do use underscores but for global variables only as they are few and far between and they stick out clearly  Other than that  a well thought out CamelCaps   function  variable name has yet to let me down

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Print statements are a valid way to debug code  I believe it is perfectly fine to debug your code by littering it with System out println  or whatever print statement works for your language    Often  this can be quicker than debugging  and you can compare printed outputs against other runs of the app   Just make sure to remove the print statements when you go to production  or better  turn them into logging statements

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I have a few    there s exceptions to everything so these are not hard and fast but they do apply in most cases  Nobody cares if your website validates  is XHTML strict  is standards-compliant  or has a W3C badge    It may earn you some high-fives from fellow Web developers  but the rest of people looking at your site could give a crap whether you ve validated your code or not  the vast majority of Web surfers are using IE or Firefox  and since both of those browsers are forgiving of nonstandards  nonstrict  invalidated HTML then you really dont need to worry about it  If you ve built a site for a car dealer  a mechanic  a radio station  a church  or a local small business  how many people in any of those businesses  target demographics do you think care about valid HTML  I d hazard a guess it s pretty close to 0    Most open-source software is useless  overcomplicated crap    Let me install this nice piece of OSS I ve found  It looks like it should do exactly what I want  Oh wait  first I have to install this other window manager thingy  OK  Then i need to get this command-line tool and add it to my path  Now I need the latest runtimes for X  Y  and Z  now i need to make sure i have these processes running  ok  great    its all configured  Now let me learn a whole new set of commands to use it  Oh cool  someone built a GUI for it  I guess I don t need to learn these commands  Wait  I need this library on here to get the GUI to work  Gotta download that now  ok  now its working   crap  I can t figure out this terrible UI    sound familiar  OSS is full of complication for complication s sake  tricky installs that you need to be an expert to perform  and tools that most people wouldn t know what to do with anyway  So many projects fall by the wayside  others are so niche that very few people would use them  and some of the decent ones  FlowPlayer  OSCommerce  etc  have such ridiculously overcomplicated and bloated source code that it defeats the purpose of being able to edit the source  You can edit the source    if you can figure out which of the 400 files contains the code that needs modification  You re really in trouble when you learn that its all 400 of them

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If you haven t read a man page  you re not a real programmer

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Programming is so easy a five year old can do it   Programming in and of itself is not hard  it s common sense  You are just telling a computer what to do    You re not a genius  please get over yourself

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C must die   Voluntarily programming in C when another language  say  D  is available should be punishable for neglect

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Lazy Programmers are the Best Programmers  A lazy programmer most often finds ways to decrease the amount of time spent writing code  especially a lot of similar or repeating code   This often translates into tools and workflows that other developers in the company team can benefit from   As the developer encounters similar projects he may create tools to bootstrap the development process  e g  creating a DRM layer that works with the company s database design paradigms    Furthermore  developers such as these often use some form of code generation  This means all bugs of the same type  for example  the code generator did not check for null parameters on all methods  can often be fixed by fixing the generator and not the 50  instances of that bug   A lazy programmer may take a few more hours to get the first product out the door  but will save you months down the line

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My controversial opinion is probably that John Carmack  ID Software  Quake etc   is not a very good programmer     Don t get me wrong  he s a very smart programmer in my opinion  but after I noticed the line   define private public  in the quake sourcecode I couldn t help but think he s a guy that gets the job done nomatter what  but in my definition not a good programmer    This opinion has gotten me into a lot of heated discussions though

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Code as Design  Three Essays by Jack W  Reeves  The source code of any software is its most accurate design document  Everything else  specs  docs  and sometimes comments  is either incorrect  outdated or misleading   Guaranteed to get you fired pretty much everywhere

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Once i saw the following from a co-worker   equal   a CompareTo b     0   I stated that he cannot assume that in a general case  but he just laughed

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My most controversial programming opinion is that finding performance problems is not about measuring  it is about capturing   If you re hunting for elephants in a room  as opposed to mice  do you need to know how big they are  NO  All you have to do is look  Their very bigness is what makes them easy to find  It isn t necessary to measure them first   The idea of measurement has been common wisdom at least since the paper on gprof   Susan L  Graham  et al 1982    when all along  right under our noses  has been a very simple and direct way to find code worth optimizing   As a small example  here s how it works  Suppose you take 5 random-time samples of the call stack  and you happen to see a particular instruction on 3 out of 5 samples  What does that tell you                                                                                                                                                               Foo  call Bar                                   Foo  call Bar                                 Foo  call Bar                                                                                                 Foo  call Bar                                                                                                                                                                               It tells you the program is spending 60  of its time doing work requested by that instruction  Removing it removes that 60                                                                                                                                                                Foo   a l Bar                                   Foo   a l Bar                       X         Foo  cXll Bar                         X                                                                       Foo   a l Bar                                                                                                                                                                               Roughly   If you can remove the instruction  or invoke it a lot less   that s a 2 5x speedup  approximately   Notice - recursion is irrelevant - if the elephant s pregnant  it s not any smaller   Then you can repeat the process  until you truly approach an optimum    This did not require accuracy of measurement  function timing  call counting  graphs  hundreds of samples  any of that typical profiling stuff    Some people use this whenever they have a performance problem  and don t understand what s the big deal   Most people have never heard of it  and when they do hear of it  think it is just an inferior mode of sampling  But it is very different  because it pinpoints problems by giving cost of call sites  as well as terminal instructions   as a percent of wall-clock time  Most profilers  not all   whether they use sampling or instrumentation  do not do that  Instead they give a variety of summary measurements that are  at best  clues to the possible location of problems  Here is a more extensive summary of the differences    In fact that paper claimed that the purpose of gprof was to  help the user evaluate alternative implementations of abstractions   It did not claim to help the user locate the code needing an alternative implementation  at a finer level then functions     My second most controversial opinion is this  or it might be if it weren t so hard to understand

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The vast majority of software being developed does not involve the end-user when gathering requirements   Usually it s just some managers who are providing  requirements

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Hardcoding is good   Really  more efficient and much easier to maintain in many cases   The number of times I ve seen constants put into parameter files really how often will you change the freezing point of water or the speed of light   For C programs just hard code these type of values into a header file  for java into a static class etc   When these parameters have a drastic effect on your programs behaviour you really want to do a regresion test on every change  this seems more natural with hard coded values  When things are stored in parameter property files the temptation is to think  this is not a program cahnge so I dont need to test it    The other advantage is it stops people messing with vital values in the parameter property files because there aren t any

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The best code is often the code you don t write   As programmers we want to solve every problem by writing some cool method   Anytime we can solve a problem and still give the users 80  of what they want without introducing more code to maintain and test we have provided waaaay more value

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If your text editor doesn t do good code completion  you re wasting everyone s time   Quickly remembering thousands of argument lists  spellings  and return values  not to mention class structures and similarly complex organizational patterns  is a task computers are good at and people  comparatively  are not  I buy wholeheartedly that slowing yourself down a bit and avoiding the gadget feature cult is a great way to increase efficiency and avoid bugs  but there is simply no benefit to spending 30 seconds hunting unnecessarily through sourcecode or docs when you could spend nil    especially if you just need a spelling  which is more often than we like to admit    Granted  if there isn t an editor that provides this functionality for your language  or the task is simple enough to knock out in the time it would take to load a heavier editor  nobody is going to tell you that Eclipse and 90 plugins is the right tool  But please don t tell me that the ability to H-J-K-L your way around like it s 1999 really saves you more time than hitting escape every time you need a method signature    even if you do feel less  hacker  doing it   Thoughts

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The users aren t idiots -- you are   So many times I ve heard developers say  so-and-so is an idiot  and my response is typically  he may be an idiot but you allowed him to be one

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Performance does matter

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Don t worry too much about what language to learn  use the industry heavy weights like c  or python  Languages like Ruby are fun in the bedroom  but don t do squat in workplace scenarios  Languages like c  and Java can handle small to the very large software projects  If anyone says otherwise  then your talking about a scripting language  Period   Before starting a project  consider how much support and code samples are available on the net  Again  choosing a language like Ruby which has very few code samples on the web compared to Java for example  will only cause you grief further down the road when your stuck on a problem   You can t post a message on a forum and expect an answer back while your boss is asking you how your coding is going  What are you going to say   I m waiting for someone to help me out on this forum   Learn one language and learn it good  Learning multiple languages may carry over skills and practices  but you ll only even be OK at all of them  Be good at one  There are entire books dedicated to Threading in Java which  when you think about it  is only one namespace out of over 100   Master one or be ok at lots

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Newer languages  and managed code do not make a bad programmer better

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Objects Should Never Be In An Invalid State  Unfortunately  so many of the ORM framework mandate zero-arg constructors for all entity classes  using setters to populate the member variables  In those cases  it s very difficult to know which setters must be called in order to construct a valid object   MyClass c   new MyClass       Object in invalid state  Doesn t have an ID  c setId 12345      Now object is valid    In my opinion  it should be impossible for an object to ever find itself in an invalid state  and the class s API should actively enforce its class invariants after every method call   Constructors and mutator methods should atomically transition an object from one valid state to another  This is much better   MyClass c   new MyClass 12345      Object starts out valid  Stays valid    As the consumer of some library  it s a huuuuuuge pain to keep track of whether all the right setters have been invoked before attempting to use an object  since the documentation usually provides no clues about the class s contract

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Web applications suck  My Internet connection is veeery slow  My experience with almost every Web site that is not Google is  at least  frustrating  Why doesn t anybody write desktop apps anymore  Oh  I see  Nobody wants to be bothered with learning how operating systems work  At least  not Windows  The last time you had to handle WM PAINT  your head exploded  Creating a worker thread to perform a long task  I mean  doing it the Windows way  was totally beyond you  What the hell was a callback  Oh  my God     Garbage collection sucks  No  it actually doesn t  But it makes the programmers suck like nothing else  In college  the first language they taught us was Visual Basic  the original one   After that  there was another course where the teachers pretended they taught us C    But the damage was done  Nobody actually knew how to use this esoteric keyword delete did  After testing our programs  we either got invalid address exceptions or memory leaks  Sometimes  we got both  Among the 1  of my faculty who can actually program  only one who can manage his memory by himself  at least  he pretends  and he s writing this rant  The rest write their programs in VB NET  which  by definition  is a bad language     Dynamic typing suck  Unless you re using assembler  of course  that s the kind of dynamic typing that actually deserves praise   What I meant is the overhead imposed by dynamic  interpreted languages makes them suck  And don t come with that silly argument that different tools are good for different jobs  C is the right language for almost everything  it s fast  powerful and portable   and  when it isn t  it s not fast enough   there s always inline assembly     I might come up with more rants  but that will be later  not now

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Modern C   is a beautiful language   There  I said it   A lot of people really hate C    but honestly  I find modern C   with STL Boost style programming to be a very expressive  elegant  and incredibly productive language most of the time     I think most people who hate C   are basing that on bad experiences with OO   C   doesn t do OO very well because polymorphism often depends on heap-allocated objects  and C   doesn t have automatic garbage collection   But C   really shines when it comes to generic libraries and functional-programming techniques which make it possible to build incredibly large  highly-maintainable systems   A lot of people say C   tries to do everything  but ends up doing nothing very well   I d probably agree that it doesn t do OO as well as other languages  but it does generic programming and functional programming better than any other mainstream C-based language    C  0x will only further underscore this truth    I also appreciate how C   lets me get low-level if necessary  and provides full access to the operating system   Plus RAII   Seriously   I really miss destructors when I program in other C-based languages    And no  garbage collection does not make destructors useless

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The latest design patterns tend to be so much snake oil   As has been said previously in this question  overuse of design patterns can harm a design much more than help it     If I hear one more person saying that  everyone should be using IOC   or some similar pile of turd   I think I ll be forced to hunt them down and teach them the error of their ways

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The use of hungarian notation should be punished with death    That should be controversial enough

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A Clever Programmer Is Dangerous  I have spent more time trying to fix code written by  clever  programmers  I d rather have a good programmer than an exceptionally smart programmer who wants to prove how clever he is by writing code that only he  or she  can interpret

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That most language proponents make a lot of noise

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Don t comment your code  Comments are not code and therefore when things change it s very easy to not change the comment that explained the code   Instead I prefer to refactor the crap out of code to a point that there is no reason for a comment   An example   if data    null      First time on the page   to   bool firstTimeOnPage   data    null  if firstTimeOnPage    The only time I really comment is when it s a TODO or explaining why  Widget GetData       only way to grab data  TODO  extract interface or wrapper

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Don t use keywords for basic types if the language has the actual type exposed  In C   this would refer to bool  Boolean   int  Int32   float  Single   long  Int64    int    bool   etc are not actual parts of the language  but rather just  shortcuts  or  aliases  for the actual type  Don t use something that doesn t exist  And in my opinion  Int16  Int32  Int64  Boolean  etc makes a heck of a lot more sense then  short    long    int

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Useful and clean high-level abstractions are significantly more important than performance  one example   Too often I watch peers spending hours writing over complicated Sprocs  or massive LINQ queries which return unintuitive anonymous types for the sake of  performance    They could achieve almost the same performance but with considerably cleaner  intuitive code

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small code is always better  but then complex    instead of if-else made me realize that sometime large code is more readable

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Good architecture is grown  not designed   Managers should make sure their team members always work below their state of the art  whatever that level is  When people work withing their comfort zone they produce higher quality code

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My one   Long switch statements are your friends  Really  At least in C    People tend to avoid and discourage others to use long switch statements beause they are  unmanagable  and  have bad performance characteristics    Well  the thing is that in C   switch statements are always compiled automagically to hash jump tables so actually using them is the Best Thing To Do    in terms of performance if you need simple branching to multiple branches  Also  if the case statements are organized and grouped intelligently  for example in alphabetical order   they are not unmanageable at all

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Most consulting programmers suck and should not be allowed to write production code   IMHO-Probably about 60  or more

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Rob Pike wrote   Data dominates  If you ve chosen the right data structures and organized things well  the algorithms will almost always be self-evident  Data structures  not algorithms  are central to programming     And since these days any serious data is in the millions of records  I content that good data modeling is the most important programming skill  whether using a rdbms or something like sqlite or amazon simpleDB or google appengine data storage      Fancy search and sorting algorithms aren t needed any more when the data  all the data  is stored in such a data storage system

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This one is mostly web related but     Use Tables for your web page layouts  If I was developing a gigantic site that needed to squeeze performance I might think about it  but nothing gives me an easier way to get a consistent look out on the browser than tables  The majority of applications that I develop are for around 100-1000 users and possible 100 at a time max   The extra bloat of the tables aren t killing my server by any means

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Ternary operators absolutely suck   They are the epitome of lazy ass programing   user- gt isLoggedIn     user- gt update     user- gt askLogin      This is so easy to screw up  A little change in revision  2   user- gt isLoggedIn    amp  amp  user- gt isNotNew time      user- gt update     user- gt askLogin      Oh yeah  just one more  little change    user- gt isLoggedIn    amp  amp  user- gt isNotNew time      user- gt update          user- gt noCredentials     user- gt askSignup           user- gt askLogin      Oh crap  what about that OTHER case   user- gt isLoggedIn    amp  amp  user- gt isNotNew time     amp  amp   user- gt isBanned     user- gt update          user- gt noCredentials       user- gt isBanned     user- gt askSignup             user- gt askLogin      NO NO NO NO  Just save us the code change  Stop being freaking lazy   if  user- gt isLoggedIn          user- gt update     else       user- gt askLogin        Because doing it right the first time will save us all from having to convert your crap ternaries AGAIN and AGAIN   if  user- gt isLoggedIn    amp  amp  user- gt isNotNew time     amp  amp   user- gt isBanned          user- gt update     else       if  user- gt noCredentials       user- gt isBanned              user- gt askSignup          else           user- gt askLogin

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If I were being controversial  I d have to suggest that Jon Skeet isn t omnipotent

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Useful and clean high-level abstractions are significantly more important than performance  one example   Too often I watch peers spending hours writing over complicated Sprocs  or massive LINQ queries which return unintuitive anonymous types for the sake of  performance    They could achieve almost the same performance but with considerably cleaner  intuitive code

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Controversial eh   I reckon the fact that C   streams use  lt  lt  and      I hate it   They are shift operators   Overloading them in this way is plain bad practice   It makes me want to kill whoever came up with that and thought it was a good idea   GRRR

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Goto is OK   is that controversial enough  Sometimes    so give us the choice  For example  BASH doesn t have goto  Maybe there is some internal reason for this but still  Also  goto is the building block of Assembly language  No if statements for you

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Cowboy coders get more done   I spend my life in the startup atmosphere  Without the Cowboy coders we d waste endless cycles making sure things are done  right    As we know it s basically impossible to forsee all issues  The Cowboy coder runs head-on into these problems and is forced to solve them much more quickly than someone who tries to forsee them all   Though  if you re Cowboy coding you had better refactor that spaghetti before someone else has to maintain it     The best ones I know use continuous refactoring  They get a ton of stuff done  don t waste time trying to predict the future  and through refactoring it becomes maintainable code   Process always gets in the way of a good Cowboy  no matter how Agile it is

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Lazy Programmers are the Best Programmers  A lazy programmer most often finds ways to decrease the amount of time spent writing code  especially a lot of similar or repeating code   This often translates into tools and workflows that other developers in the company team can benefit from   As the developer encounters similar projects he may create tools to bootstrap the development process  e g  creating a DRM layer that works with the company s database design paradigms    Furthermore  developers such as these often use some form of code generation  This means all bugs of the same type  for example  the code generator did not check for null parameters on all methods  can often be fixed by fixing the generator and not the 50  instances of that bug   A lazy programmer may take a few more hours to get the first product out the door  but will save you months down the line

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Requirements analysis  specification  design  and documentation will almost never fit into a  template    You are 100  of the time better off by starting with a blank document and beginning to type with a view of  I will explain this in such a way that if I were dead and someone else read this document  they would know everything that I know and see and understand now  and then organizing from there  letting section headings and such develop naturally and fit the task you are specifying  rather than being constrained to some business or school s idea of what your document should look like   If you have to do a diagram  rather than using somebody s formal and incomprehensible system  you re often better off just drawing a diagram that makes sense  with a clear legend  which actually specifies the system you are trying to specify and communicates the information that the developer on the other end  often you  after a few years  needs to receive    If you have to  once you ve written the real documentation  you can often shoehorn it into whatever template straightjacket your organization is imposing on you   You ll probably find yourself having to add section headings and duplicate material  though    The only time templates for these kinds of documents make sense is when you have a large number of tasks which are very similar in nature  differing only in details    Write a program to allow single-use remote login access through this modem bank  driving the terminal connection nexus with C-Kermit    Produce a historical trend and forecast report for capacity usage    Use this library to give all reports the ability to be faxed    Fix this code for the year 2000 problem   and  Add database triggers to this table to populate a software product provided for us by a third-party vendor  can not all be described by the same template  no matter what people may think   And for the record  the requirements and design diagramming techniques that my college classes attempted to teach me and my classmates could not be used to specify a simple calculator program  and everyone knew it

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Premature optimization is NOT the root of all evil  Lack of proper planning is the root of all evil      Remember the old naval saw      Proper Planning Prevents P ss Poor   Performance

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Null references should be removed from OO languages  Coming from a Java and C  background  where its normal to return null from a method to indicate a failure  I ve come to conclude that nulls cause a lot of avoidable problems  Language designers can remove a whole class of errors relate to NullRefernceExceptions if they simply eliminate null references from code   Additionally  when I call a method  I have no way of knowing whether that method can return null references unless I actually dig in the implementation  I d like to see more languages follow F  s model for handling nulls  F  doesn t allow programmers to return null references  at least for classes compiled in F    instead it requires programmers to represent empty objects using option types  The nice thing about this design is how useful information  such as whether a function can return null references  is propagated through the type system  functions which return a type  a have a different return type than functions which return  a option

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If you have any idea how to program you are not fit to place a button on a form  Is that controversial enough      No matter how hard we try  it s almost impossible to have appropriate empathy with 53 year old Doris who has to use our order-entry software   We simply cannot grasp the mental model of what she imagines is going on inside the computer  because we don t need to imagine  we know whats going on  or have a very good idea   Interaction Design should be done by non-programmers   Of course  this is never actually going to happen   Contradictorily I m quite glad about that  I like UI design even though deep down I know I m unsuited to it   For further info  read the book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum   Be warned  I found this book upsetting and insulting  it s a difficult read if you are a developer that cares about the user s experience

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Upfront design - don t just start writing code because you re excited to write code  I ve seen SO many apps that are poorly designed because the developer was so excited to get coding that they just opened up a white page and started writing code  I understand that things change during the development lifecycle  However  it s difficult working with applications that have several different layouts and development methodologies from form to form  method to method   It s difficult to hit the target your application is to handle if you haven t clearly defined the task and how you plan to code it  Take some time  and not just 5 minutes  and make sure you ve laid out as much of it has you can before you start coding  This way you ll avoid a spaghetti mess that your replacement will have to support

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Rob Pike wrote   Data dominates  If you ve chosen the right data structures and organized things well  the algorithms will almost always be self-evident  Data structures  not algorithms  are central to programming     And since these days any serious data is in the millions of records  I content that good data modeling is the most important programming skill  whether using a rdbms or something like sqlite or amazon simpleDB or google appengine data storage      Fancy search and sorting algorithms aren t needed any more when the data  all the data  is stored in such a data storage system

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This one is not exactly on programming  because html css are not programming languages   Tables are ok for layout  css and divs can t do everything  save yourself the hassle and use a simple table  then use css on top of it

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We re software developers  not C C  C   PHP Perl Python Java     developers   After you ve been exposed to a few languages  picking up a new one and being productive with it is a small task   That is to say that you shouldn t be afraid of new languages   Of course  there is a large difference between being productive and mastering a language   But  that s no reason to shy away from a language you ve never seen   It bugs me when people say   I m a PHP developer   or when a job offer says   Java developer    After a few years experience of being a developer  new languages and APIs really shouldn t be intimidating and going from never seeing a language to being productive with it shouldn t take very long at all   I know this is controversial but it s my opinion

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Arrays should by default be 1-based rather than 0-based   This is not necessarily the case with system implementation languages  but languages like Java swallowed more C oddities than they should have    Element 1  should be the first element  not the second  to avoid confusion   Computer science is not software development   You wouldn t hire an engineer who studied only physics  after all   Learn as much mathematics as is feasible   You won t use most of it  but you need to be able to think that way to be good at software   The single best programming language yet standardized is Common Lisp  even if it is verbose and has zero-based arrays   That comes largely from being designed as a way to write computations  rather than as an abstraction of a von Neumann machine   At least 90  of all comparative criticism of programming languages can be reduced to  Language A has feature C  and I don t know how to do C or something equivalent in Language B  so Language A is better     Best practices  is the most impressive way to spell  mediocrity  I ve ever seen

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One I have been tossing around for a while    The data is the system   Processes and software are built for data  not the other way around     Without data  the process software has little value   Data still has value without a process or software around it   Once we understand the data  what it does  how it interacts  the different forms it exists in at different stages  only then can a solution be built to support the system of data   Successful software systems processes seem to have an acute awareness  if not fanatical mindfulness of  where  the data is at in any given moment

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When someone dismisses an entire programming language as  clumsy   it usually turns out he doesn t know how to use it

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You can t measure productivity by counting lines of code   Everyone knows this  but for some reason the practice still persists

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New web projects should consider not using Java   I ve been using Java to do web development for over 10 years now   At first  it was a step in the right direction compared to the available alternatives   Now  there are better alternatives than Java   This is really just a specific case of the magic hammer approach to problem solving  but it s one that s really painful

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To be really controversial   You know nothing   or in other words   I know that I know nothing    this could be paraphrased in many kinds but I think you get it    When starting with computers developing  IMHO there are three stages everyone has to walk through   The newbie  knows nothing  this is fact   The intermediate  thinks he knows something very much  all   this is conceit   The professional  knows that he knows nothing  because as a programmer most time you have to work on things you have never done before   This is no bad thing  I love to familiarize myself to new things all the time   I think as a programmer you have to know how to learn - or better  To learn to learn  because remember  You know nothing

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Opinion  There should not be any compiler warnings  only errors  Or  formulated differently You should always compile your code with -Werror   Reason  Either the compiler thinks it is something which should be corrected  in case it should be an error  or it is not necessary to fix  in which case the compiler should just shut up

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Only write an abstraction if it s going to save 3X as much time later   I see people write all these crazy abstractions sometimes and I think to myself   Why    Unless an abstraction is really going to save you time later or it s going to save the person maintaining your code time  it seems people are just writing spaghetti code more and more

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I have two   Design patterns are sometimes a way for bad programmer to write bad code -  when you have a hammer - all the world looks like a nail  mentality  If there si something I hate to hear is two developers create design by patterns   We should use command with facade        There is no such thing as  premature optimization   You should profile and optimize the your code before you get to that point when it becomes too painful to do so

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Writing it yourself can be a valid option   In my experience there seems to be too much enthusiasm when it comes to using 3rd party code to solve a problem  The option of solving the problem by themselves does usually not cross peoples minds  Although don t get me wrong  I am not propagating to never ever use libraries  What I am saying is  among the possible frameworks and modules you are considering to use  add the option of implementing the solution yourself   But why would you code your own version    Don t reinvent the wheel  But  if you only need a piece of wood  do you really need a whole cart wheel  In other words  do you really need openCV to flip an image along an axis  Compromise  You usually have to make compromises concerning your design  in order to be able to use a specific library  Is the amount of changes you have to incorporate worth the functionality you will receive  Learning  You have to learn to use these new frameworks and modules  How long will it take you  Is it worth your while  Will it take longer to learn than to implement  Cost  Not everything is for free  Although  this includes your time  Consider how much time this software you are about to use will save you and if it is worth it s price   Also remember that you have to invest time to learn it  You are a programmer  not     a person who just clicks things together  sorry  couldn t think of anything witty      The last point is debatable

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This one is mostly web related but     Use Tables for your web page layouts  If I was developing a gigantic site that needed to squeeze performance I might think about it  but nothing gives me an easier way to get a consistent look out on the browser than tables  The majority of applications that I develop are for around 100-1000 users and possible 100 at a time max   The extra bloat of the tables aren t killing my server by any means

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Cowboy coders get more done   I spend my life in the startup atmosphere  Without the Cowboy coders we d waste endless cycles making sure things are done  right    As we know it s basically impossible to forsee all issues  The Cowboy coder runs head-on into these problems and is forced to solve them much more quickly than someone who tries to forsee them all   Though  if you re Cowboy coding you had better refactor that spaghetti before someone else has to maintain it     The best ones I know use continuous refactoring  They get a ton of stuff done  don t waste time trying to predict the future  and through refactoring it becomes maintainable code   Process always gets in the way of a good Cowboy  no matter how Agile it is

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Anonymous functions suck   I m teaching myself jQuery and  while it s an elegant and immensely useful technology  most people seem to treat it as some kind of competition in maximizing the user of anonymous functions   Function and procedure naming  along with variable naming  is the greatest expressive ability we have in programming   Passing functions around as data is a great technique  but making them anonymous and therefore non-self-documenting is a mistake   It s a lost chance for expressing the meaning of the code

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I am of the opinion that there are too many people making programming decisions that shouldn t be worried about implementation

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Two lines of code is too many   If a method has a second line of code  it is a code smell   Refactor

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Your job is to put yourself out of work   When you re writing software for your employer  any software that you create is to be written in such a way that it can be picked up by any developer and understood with a minimal amount of effort  It is well designed  clearly and consistently written  formatted cleanly  documented where it needs to be  builds daily as expected  checked into the repository  and appropriately versioned    If you get hit by a bus  laid off  fired  or walk off the job  your employer should be able to replace you on a moment s notice  and the next guy could step into your role  pick up your code and be up and running within a week tops  If he or she can t do that  then you ve failed miserably   Interestingly  I ve found that having that goal has made me more valuable to my employers  The more I strive to be disposable  the more valuable I become to them

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Never change what is not broken

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Comments are Lies   Comments don t run and are easily neglected  It s better to express the intention with clear  refactored code illustrated by unit tests   Unit tests written TDD of course      We don t write comments because they re verbose and obscure what s really going on in the code  If you feel the need to comment - find out what s not clear in the code and refactor write clearer tests until there s no need for the comment         something I learned from Extreme Programming  assumes of course that you have established team norms for cleaning the code

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The simplest approach is the best approach  Programmers like to solve assumed or inferred requirements that add levels of complexity to a solution     I assume this block of code is going to be a performance bottleneck  therefore I will add all this extra code to mitigate this problem      I assume the user is going to want to do X  therefore I will add this really cool additional feature     If I make my code solve for this unneeded scenario it will be a good opportunity to use this new technology I ve been interested in trying out    In reality  the simplest solution that meets the requirements is best  This also gives you the most flexibility in taking your solution in a new direction if and when new requirements or problems come up

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Googling it  is okay   Yes  I know it offends some people out there that their years of intense memorization and or glorious stacks of programming books are starting to fall by the wayside to a resource that anyone can access within seconds  but you shouldn t hold that against people that use it   Too often I hear googling answers to problems the result of criticism  and it really is without sense   First of all  it must be conceded that everyone needs materials to reference   You don t know everything and you will need to look things up   Conceding that  does it really matter where you got the information   Does it matter if you looked it up in a book  looked it up on Google  or heard it from a talking frog that you hallucinated   No   A right answer is a right answer   What is important is that you understand the material  use it as the means to an end of a successful programming solution  and the client your employer is happy with the results    although if you are getting answers from hallucinatory talking frogs  you should probably get some help all the same

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Programmers should avoid method hiding through inheritance at all costs   In my experience  virtually every place I have ever seen inherited method hiding used it has caused problems  Method hiding results in objects behaving differently when accessed through a base type reference vs  a derived type reference - this is generally a Bad Thing  While many programmers are not formally aware of it  most intuitively expect that objects will adhere to the Liskov Substitution Principle  When objects violate this expectation  many of the assumptions inherent to object-oriented systems can begin to fray  The most egregious cases I ve seen is when the hidden method alters the state of the object instance  In these cases  the behavior of the object can change in subtle ways that are difficult to debug and diagnose   Ok  so there may be some infrequent cases where method hiding is actually useful and beneficial - like emulating return type covariance of methods in languages that don t support it  But the vast majority of time  when developers use method hiding it is either out of ignorance  or accident  or as a way to hack around some problem that probably deserves better design treatment  In general  the beneficial cases I ve seen of method hiding  not to say there aren t others  is when a side-effect free method that returns some information is hidden by one that computes something more applicable to the calling context   Languages like C  have improved things a bit by requiring the new keyword on methods that hide a base class method - at least helping avoid involuntary use of method hiding  But I find that many people still confuse the meaning of new with that of override - particularly since in simple scenarios their behavior can appear identical  It would be nice if tools like FxCop actually had built-in rules for identifying potentially bad usage of method hiding   By the way  method hiding through inheritance should not be confused with other kinds of hiding - such as through nesting - which I believe is a valid and useful construct with fewer potential problems

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Upfront design - don t just start writing code because you re excited to write code  I ve seen SO many apps that are poorly designed because the developer was so excited to get coding that they just opened up a white page and started writing code  I understand that things change during the development lifecycle  However  it s difficult working with applications that have several different layouts and development methodologies from form to form  method to method   It s difficult to hit the target your application is to handle if you haven t clearly defined the task and how you plan to code it  Take some time  and not just 5 minutes  and make sure you ve laid out as much of it has you can before you start coding  This way you ll avoid a spaghetti mess that your replacement will have to support

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Size matters  Embellish your code so it looks bigger

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Opinion  explicit variable declaration is a great thing     I ll never understand the  wisdom  of letting the developer waste costly time tracking down runtime errors caused by variable name typos instead of simply letting the compiler interpreter catch them   Nobody s ever given me an explanation better than  well it saves time since I don t have to write  int i      Uhhhhh    yeah  sure  but how much time does it take to track down a runtime error

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Don t use inheritance unless you can explain why you need it

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C   is one of the WORST programming languages - EVER   It has all of the hallmarks of something designed by committee - it does not do any given job well  and does some jobs  like OO  terribly  It has a  kitchen sink  desperation to it that just won t go away   It is a horrible  first language  to learn to program with  You get no elegance  no assistance  from the language   Instead you have bear traps and mine fields  memory management  templates  etc     It is not a good language to try to learn OO concepts  It behaves as  C with a class wrapper  instead of a proper OO language   I could go on  but will leave it at that for now  I have never liked programming in C    and although I  cut my teeth  on FORTRAN  I totally loved programming in C  I still think C was one of the great  classic  languages  Something that C   is certainly NOT  in my opinion   Cheers   -R  EDIT  To respond to the comments on teaching C    You can teach C   in two ways - either teaching it as C  on steroids   start with variables  conditions  loops  etc   or teaching it as a pure  OO  language  start with classes  methods  etc   You can find teaching texts that use one or other of these approaches  I prefer the latter approach  OO first  as it does emphasize the capabilities of C   as an OO language  which was the original design emphasis of C     If you want to teach C    as C   then I think you should teach C  not C     But the problem with C   as a first language in my experience is that the language is simply too BIG to teach in one semester  plus most  intro  texts try and cover everything  It is simply not possible to cover all the topics in a  first language  course  You have to at least split it into 2 semesters  and then it s no longer  first language   IMO   I do teach C    but only as a  new language  - that is  you must be proficient in some prior  pure  language  not scripting or macros  before you can enroll in the course  C   is a very fine  second language  to learn  IMO   -R   Nother Edit   to Konrad   I do not at all agree that C    is superior in every way  to C  I spent years coding C programs for microcontrollers and other embedded applications  The C compilers for these devices are highly optimized  often producing code as good as hand-coded assembler  When you move to C    you gain a tremendous overhead imposed by the compiler in order to manage language features you may not use  In embedded applications  you gain little by adding classes and such  IMO  What you need is tight  clean code  You can write it in C    but then you re really just writing C  and the C compilers are more optimized in these applications   I wrote a MIDI engine  first in C  later in C    at the vendor s request  for an embedded controller  sound card   In the end  to meet the performance requirements  MIDI timings  etc  we had to revert to pure C for all of the core code  We were able to use C   for the high-level code  and having classes was very sweet - but we needed C to get the performance at the lower level  The C code was an order of magnitude faster than the C   code  but hand coded assembler was only slightly faster than the compiled C code  This was back in the early 1990s  just to place the events properly   -R

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Logger configs are a waste of time   Why have them if it means learning a new syntax  especially one that fails silently   Don t get me wrong  I love good logging   I love logger inheritance and adding formatters to handlers to loggers   But why do it in a config file   Do you want to make changes to logging code without recompiling   Why   If you put your logging code in a separate class  file  whatever  what difference will it make   Do you want to distribute a configurable log with your product to clients   Doesn t this just give too much information anyway   The most frustrating thing about it is that popular utilities written in a popular language tend to write good APIs in the format that language specifies   Write a Java logging utility and I know you ve generated the javadocs  which I know how to navigate   Write a domain specific language for your logger config and what do we have   Maybe there s documentation  but where the heck is it   You decide on a way to organize it  and I m just not interested in following your line of thought

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It s fine if you don t know  But you re fired if you can t even google it   Internet is a tool  It s not making you stupider if you re learning from it

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Defects and Enhancement Requests are the Same  Unless you are developing software on a fixed-price contract  there should be no difference when prioritizing your backlog between  bugs  and  enhancements  and  new feature  requests  OK - maybe that s not controversial  but I have worked on enterprise IT projects where the edict was that  all open bugs must be fixed in the next release   even if that left no developer time for the most desirable new features  So  a problem which was encountered by 1  of the users  1  of the time took precedence over a new feature would might be immediately useful to 90  of the users   I like to take my entire project backlog  put estimates around each item and take it to the user community for prioritization - with items not classified as  defect    enhancement   etc

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A degree in Computer Science or other IT area DOES make you a more well rounded programmer  I don t care how many years of experience you have  how many blogs you ve read  how many open source projects you re involved in   A qualification  I d recommend longer than 3 years  exposes you to a different way of thinking and gives you a great foundation   Just because you ve written some better code than a guy with a BSc in Computer Science  does not mean you are better than him   What you have he can pick up in an instant which is not the case the other way around   Having a qualification shows your commitment  the fact that you would go above and beyond experience to make you a better developer   Developers which are good at what they do AND have a qualification can be very intimidating   I would not be surprized if this answer gets voted down      Also  once you have a qualification  you slowly stop comparing yourself to those with qualifications  my experience    You realize that it all doesn t matter at the end  as long as you can work well together   Always act mercifully towards other developers  irrespective of qualifications

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Hibernate is useless and damaging to the minds of developers

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System Data DataSet Rocks   Strongly-typed DataSets are better  in my opinion  than custom DDD objects for most business applications   Reasoning  We re bending over backwards to figure out Unit of Work on custom objects  LINQ to SQL  Entity Framework and it s adding complexity  Use a nice code generator from somewhere to generate the data layer and the Unit of Work sits on the object collections  DataTable and DataSet --no mystery

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Social skills matter more than technical skills  Agreable but average programmers with good social skills will have a more successful carreer than outstanding programmers who are disagreable people

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That the Law of Demeter  considered in context of aggregation and composition  is an anti-pattern

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That most language proponents make a lot of noise

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I fail to understand why people think that Java is absolutely the best  first  programming language to be taught in universities    For one  I believe that first programming language should be such that it highlights the need to learn control flow and variables  not objects and syntax  For another  I believe that people who have not had experience in debugging memory leaks in C   C   cannot fully appreciate what Java brings to the table   Also the natural progression should be from  how can I do this  to  how can I find the library which does that  and not the other way round

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Managers know everything  It s been my experience that managers didn t get there by knowing code usually   No matter what you tell them it s too long  not right or too expensive   And another that follows on from the first   There s never time to do it right but there s always time to do it again  A good engineer friend once said that in anger to describe a situation where management halved his estimates  got a half-assed version out of him  then gave him twice as much time to rework it because it failed   It s a fairly regular thing in the commercial software world   And one that came to mind today while trying to configure a router with only a web interface   Web interfaces are for suckers  The CLI on the previous version of the firmware was oh so nice   This version has a web interface  which attempts to hide all of the complexity of networking from clueless IT droids  and can t even get VLANs correct

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Globals and or Singletons are not inherently evil  I come from more of a sysadmin  shell  Perl  and my  real  programming   PHP type background  last year I was thrown into a Java development gig   Singletons are evil  Globals are so evil they are not even allowed  Yet  Java has things like AOP  and now various  Dependency Injection  frameworks  we used Google Guice   AOP less so  but DI things for sure give you what  Globals  Uhh  thanks

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You don t have to program everything  I m getting tired that everything  but then everything needs to be stuffed in a program  like that is always faster  everything needs to be webbased  evrything needs to be done via a computer  Please  just use your pen and paper  it s faster and less maintenance

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Managers know everything  It s been my experience that managers didn t get there by knowing code usually   No matter what you tell them it s too long  not right or too expensive   And another that follows on from the first   There s never time to do it right but there s always time to do it again  A good engineer friend once said that in anger to describe a situation where management halved his estimates  got a half-assed version out of him  then gave him twice as much time to rework it because it failed   It s a fairly regular thing in the commercial software world   And one that came to mind today while trying to configure a router with only a web interface   Web interfaces are for suckers  The CLI on the previous version of the firmware was oh so nice   This version has a web interface  which attempts to hide all of the complexity of networking from clueless IT droids  and can t even get VLANs correct

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Opinion  Duration in the development field does not always mean the same as experience   Many trades look at  years of experience  in a language   Yes  5 years of C  can make sense since you may learn new tricks and what not  However  if you are with the company and maintaining the same code base for a number of years  I feel as if you are not gaining the amount of exposure to different situations as a person who works on different situations and client needs     I once interviewed a person who prided himself on having 10 years of programming experience and worked with VB5  6  and VB Net   all in the same company during that time   After more probing  I found out that while he worked with all of those versions of VB  he was only upgrading and constantly maintaining his original VB5 app   Never modified the architecture and let the upgrade wizards do their thing   I have interviewed people who only have 2 years in the field but have worked on multiple projects that have more  experience  than him

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There are far too many programmers who write far too much code

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My controversial opinion  OO Programming is vastly overrated  and treated like a silver bullet   when it is really just another tool in the toolbox  nothing more

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Tools  Methodology  Patterns  Frameworks  etc  are no substitute for a properly trained programmer  I m sick and tired of dealing with people  mostly managers  who think that the latest tool  methodology  pattern or framework is a silver bullet that will eliminate the need for hiring experienced developers to write their software   Although  as a consultant who makes a living rescuing at-risk projects  I shouldn t complain

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It s fine if you don t know  But you re fired if you can t even google it   Internet is a tool  It s not making you stupider if you re learning from it

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I d say that my most controversial opinion on programming is that I honestly believe you shouldn t worry so much about throw-away code and rewriting code   Too many times people feel that if you write something down  then changing it means you did something wrong    But the way my brain works is to get something very simple working  and update the code slowly  while ensuring that the code and the test continue to function together   It may end up actually creating classes  methods  additional parameters  etc   I fully well know will go away in a few hours   But I do it because i want to take only small steps toward my goal   In the end  I don t think I spend any more time using this technique than the programmers that stare at the screen trying to figure out the best design up front before writing a line of code   The benefit I get is that I m not having to constantly deal with software that no longer works because I happen to break it somehow and am trying to figure out what stopped working and why

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Good Coders Code and Great Coders Reuse It  This is happening right now But  Good Coder  is the only ONE who enjoy that code   and  Great Coders  are for only to find out the bug in to that because they don t have the time to think and code  But they have time for find the bug in that code   so don t criticize          Create your own code how YOU want

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Opinion  most code out there is crappy  because that s what the programmers WANT it to be   Indirectly  we have been nurturing a culture of extreme creativeness  It s not that I don t think problem solving has creative elements -- it does -- it s just that it s not even remotely the same as something like painting  see Paul Graham s famous  Hackers and Painters  essay     If we bend our industry towards that approach  ultimately it means letting every programmer go forth and whack out whatever highly creative  crazy stuff they want  Of course  for any sizable project  trying to put together dozens of unrelated  unstructured  unplanned bits into one final coherent bit won t work by definition  That s not a guess  or an estimate  it s the state of the industry that we face today  How many times have you seen sub-bits of functionality in a major program that were completely inconsistent with the rest of the code  It s so common now  it s a wonder anyone cause use any of these messes    Convoluted  complicated  ugly stuff that just keeps getting worse and more unstable  If we were building something physical  everyone on the planet would call us out on how horribly ugly and screwed up the stuff is  but because it more or less hidden by being virtual  we are able to get away with some of the worst manufacturing processing that our species will ever see   Can you imagine a car where four different people designed the four different wheels  in four different ways    But the sad part  the controversial part of it all  is that there is absolutely NO reason for it to be this way  other than historically the culture was towards more freedom and less organization  so we stayed that way  and probably got a lot worse   Software development is a joke  but it s a joke because that s what the programmers want it to be  but would never in a million years admit that it was true  a  plot by management  is a better reason for most people     How long will we keep shooting ourselves in the foot  before we wake up and realize that we the ones holding the gun  pointing it and also pulling the trigger   Paul

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Unnamed  tuples are evil   If you re using tuples as a container for several objects with unique meanings  use a class instead  If you re using them to hold several objects that should be accessible by index  use a list  If you re using them to return multiple values from a method  use Out parameters instead  this does require that your language supports pass-by-reference  If it s part of a code obfuscation strategy  keep using them    I see people using tuples just because they re too lazy to bother giving NAMES to their objects  Users of the API are then forced to access items in the tuple based on a meaningless index instead of a useful name

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My controversial opinion  Java doesn t suck but Java API s do  Why do java libraries insist on making it hard to do simple tasks  And why  instead of fixing the APIs  do they create frameworks to help manage the boilerplate code  This opinion can apply to any language that requires 10 or more lines of code to read a line from a file

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C   is one of the WORST programming languages - EVER   It has all of the hallmarks of something designed by committee - it does not do any given job well  and does some jobs  like OO  terribly  It has a  kitchen sink  desperation to it that just won t go away   It is a horrible  first language  to learn to program with  You get no elegance  no assistance  from the language   Instead you have bear traps and mine fields  memory management  templates  etc     It is not a good language to try to learn OO concepts  It behaves as  C with a class wrapper  instead of a proper OO language   I could go on  but will leave it at that for now  I have never liked programming in C    and although I  cut my teeth  on FORTRAN  I totally loved programming in C  I still think C was one of the great  classic  languages  Something that C   is certainly NOT  in my opinion   Cheers   -R  EDIT  To respond to the comments on teaching C    You can teach C   in two ways - either teaching it as C  on steroids   start with variables  conditions  loops  etc   or teaching it as a pure  OO  language  start with classes  methods  etc   You can find teaching texts that use one or other of these approaches  I prefer the latter approach  OO first  as it does emphasize the capabilities of C   as an OO language  which was the original design emphasis of C     If you want to teach C    as C   then I think you should teach C  not C     But the problem with C   as a first language in my experience is that the language is simply too BIG to teach in one semester  plus most  intro  texts try and cover everything  It is simply not possible to cover all the topics in a  first language  course  You have to at least split it into 2 semesters  and then it s no longer  first language   IMO   I do teach C    but only as a  new language  - that is  you must be proficient in some prior  pure  language  not scripting or macros  before you can enroll in the course  C   is a very fine  second language  to learn  IMO   -R   Nother Edit   to Konrad   I do not at all agree that C    is superior in every way  to C  I spent years coding C programs for microcontrollers and other embedded applications  The C compilers for these devices are highly optimized  often producing code as good as hand-coded assembler  When you move to C    you gain a tremendous overhead imposed by the compiler in order to manage language features you may not use  In embedded applications  you gain little by adding classes and such  IMO  What you need is tight  clean code  You can write it in C    but then you re really just writing C  and the C compilers are more optimized in these applications   I wrote a MIDI engine  first in C  later in C    at the vendor s request  for an embedded controller  sound card   In the end  to meet the performance requirements  MIDI timings  etc  we had to revert to pure C for all of the core code  We were able to use C   for the high-level code  and having classes was very sweet - but we needed C to get the performance at the lower level  The C code was an order of magnitude faster than the C   code  but hand coded assembler was only slightly faster than the compiled C code  This was back in the early 1990s  just to place the events properly   -R

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Software engineers should not work with computer science guys  Their differences   SEs care about code reusability  while CSs just suss out code SEs care about performance  while CSs just want to have things done now SEs care about whole structure  while CSs do not give a toss

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If you only know one language  no matter how well you know it  you re not a great programmer   There seems to be an attitude that says once you re really good at C  or Java or whatever other language you started out learning then that s all you need  I don t believe it- every language I have ever learned has taught me something new about programming that I have been able to bring back into my work with all the others  I think that anyone who restricts themselves to one language will never be as good as they could be   It also indicates to me a certain lack of inquistiveness and willingness to experiment that doesn t necessarily tally with the qualities I would expect to find in a really good programmer

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Every developer should be familiar with the basic architecture of modern computers  This also applies to developers who target a virtual machine  maybe even more so  because they have been told time and time again that they don t need to worry themselves with memory management etc

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Reuse of code is inversely proportional to its  reusability    Simply because  reusable  code is more complex  whereas quick hacks are easy to understand  so they get reused   Software failures should take down the system  so that it can be examined and fixed   Software attempting to handle failure conditions is often worse than crashing   ie  is it better to have a system reset after crashing  or should it be indefinitely hung because the failure handler has a bug

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Explicit self in Python s method declarations is poor design choice  Method calls got syntactic sugar  but declarations didn t  It s a leaky abstraction  by design   that causes annoying errors  including runtime errors with apparent off-by-one error in reported number of arguments

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People complain about removing  goto  from the language  I happen to think that any sort of conditional jump is highly overrated and that  if   while   switch  and a general purpose  for  loop are highly overrated and should be used with extreme caution   Everytime you make a comparison and conditional jump a tiny bit of complexity is added and this complexity adds up quickly once the call stack gets a couple hundred items deep   My first choice is to avoid the conditional  but if it isn t practical my next preference is to keep the conditional complexity in constructors or factory methods   Clearly this isn t practical for many projects and algorithms  like control flow loops   but it is something I enjoy pushing on   -Rick

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Lower camelCase is stupid and unsemantic  Using lower camelCase makes the name identifier   name  used from this point  look like a two-part thing  Upper CamelCase however  gives the clear indication that all the words belong together   Hungarian notation is different     because the first part of the name is a type indicator  and so it has a separate meaning from the rest of the name   Some might argue that lower camelCase should be used for functions procedures  especially inside classes  This is popular in Java and object oriented PHP  However  there is no reason to do that to indicate that they are class methods  because BY THE WAY THEY ARE ACCESSED it becomes more than clear that these are just that   Some code examples     Java myobj objMethod      doesn t the dot and parens indicate that objMethod is a method of myobj     PHP  myobj- gt objMethod      doesn t the pointer and parens indicate that objMethod is a method of myobj    Upper CamelCase is useful for class names  and other static names  All non-static content should be recognised by the way they are accessed  not by their name format     Here s my homogenous code example  where name behaviours are indicated by other things than their names     also  I prefer underscore to separate words in names      Java my obj   new MyObj     Clearly a class  since it s upper CamelCase my obj obj method     Clearly a method  since it s executed my obj obj var   Clearly an attribute  since it s referenced    PHP  my obj   new MyObj    my obj- gt obj method    my obj- gt obj var MyObj  MyStaticMethod      Python MyObj   MyClass   copies the reference of the class to a new name my obj   MyObj     Clearly a class  being instantiated my obj obj method     Clearly a method  since it s executed my obj obj var   clearly an attribute  since it s referenced my obj obj method   Also  an attribute  but holding the instance method  my method   myobj obj method   Instance method my method     Same as myobj obj method   MyClassMethod   MyObj obj method   Attribute holding the class method MyClassMethod myobj    Same as myobj obj method   MyClassMethod MyObj    Same as calling MyObj obj method   as a static classmethod   So there goes  my completely obsubjective opinion on camelCase

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You need to watch out for Object-Obsessed Programmers   e g  if you write a class that models built-in types such as ints or floats  you may be an object-obsessed programmer

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Use type inference anywhere and everywhere possible     Edit    Here is a link to a blog entry I wrote several months ago about why I feel this way    http   blogs msdn com jaredpar archive 2008 09 09 when-to-use-type-inference aspx

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For a good programmer language is not a problem   It may be not very controvertial but I hear a lot o whining from other programmers like  why don t they all use delphi     C  sucks    i would change company if they forced me to use java  and so on  What i think is that a good programmer is flexible and is able to write good programms in any programming language that he might have to learn in his life

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SQL could and should have been done better   Because its original spec was limited  various venders have been extending the language in different directions for years   SQL that is written for MS-SQL is different than SQL for Oracle  IBM  MySQL  Sybase  etc   Other serious languages  take C   for example  were carefully standardized so that C   written under one compiler will generally compile unmodified under another   Why couldn t SQL have been designed and standardized better   HTML was a seriously broken choice as a browser display language   We ve spent years extending it through CSS  XHTML  Javascript  Ajax  Flash  etc  in order to make a useable UI  and the result is still not as good as your basic thick-client windows app   Plus  a competent web programmer now needs to know three or four languages in order to make a decent UI   Oh yeah   Hungarian notation is an abomination

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XHTML is evil  Write HTML   You will have to set the MIME type to text html anyway  so why fooling yourself into believing that you are really writing XML  Whoever is going to download your page is going to believe that it is HTML  so make it HTML    And with that  feel free and happy to not close your  lt li   it isn t necessary  Don t close the html tag  the file is over anyway  It is valid HTML and it can be parsed perfectly    It will create more readable  less boilerplate code and you don t lose a thing  HTML parsers work good   And when you are done  move on to HTML5  It is better

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You can t write a web application without a remote debugger  Web applications typically tie together interactions between multiple languages on the client and server side  require interaction from a user and often include third-party code that can be anything from a simple API implementation to a byzantine framework    I ve lost count of the number of times I ve had another developer sat with me while I step into and follow through what s actually going on in a complex web application with a decent remote debugger to see them flabbergasted and amazed that such tools exist  Often they still don t take the trouble to install and setup these kinds of tools even after seeing them in action    You just can t debug a non trivial web application with print statements  Times ten if you didn t right all the code in your application   If your debugger can step through all the various languages in use and show you the http transactions taking place then so much the better    You can t develop web applications without Firebug  Along similar lines  once you have used Firebug  or very near equivalent  you look on anyone trying to develop web applications with a mixture of pity and horror  Particularly with Firebug showing computed styles  if you remember back to NOT using it and spending hours randomly changing various bits of CSS and adding   important  in too many places to be funny you will never go back

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Not all programmers are created equal  Quite often managers think that DeveloperA    DeveloperB simply because they have same level of experience and so on  In actual fact  the performance of one developer can be 10x or even 100x that of another   It s politically risky to talk about it  but sometimes I feel like pointing out that  even though several team members may appear to be of equal skill  it s not always the case  I have even seen cases where lead developers were  beyond hope  and junior devs did all the actual work - I made sure they got the credit  though

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The more process you put around programming  the worse the code becomes  I have noticed something in my 8 or so years of programming  and it seems ridiculous  It s that the only way to get quality is to employ quality developers  and remove as much process and formality from them as you can  Unit testing  coding standards  code peer reviews  etc only reduce quality  not increase it  It sounds crazy  because the opposite should be true  more unit testing should lead to better code  great coding standards should lead to more readable code  code reviews should improve the quality of code  but it s not   I think it boils down to the fact we call it  Software Engineering  when really it s design and not engineering at all     Some numbers to substantiate this statement      From the Editor      IEEE Software  November December 2001      Quantifying Soft Factors      by Steve McConnell               Limited Importance of Process Maturity            In comparing medium-size projects    100 000 lines of code   the one with   the worst process will require 1 43   times as much effort as the one with   the best process  all other things   being equal  In other words  the   maximum influence of process maturity   on a project   s productivity is 1 43               What Clark doesn   t emphasize is that   for a program of 100 000 lines of   code  several human-oriented factors   influence productivity more than   process does               The seniority-oriented factors alone    AEXP  LTEX  PEXP  exert an influence   of 3 02  The seven   personnel-oriented factors   collectively  ACAP  AEXP  LTEX    PCAP  PCON  PEXP  and SITE     exert a   staggering influence range of 25 8    This simple fact accounts for much of   the reason that non-process-oriented   organizations such as Microsoft    Amazon com  and other entrepreneurial   powerhouses can experience   industry-leading productivity while   seemingly shortchanging process           The Bottom Line          It turns out that trading process   sophistication for staff continuity    business domain experience  private   offices  and other human-oriented   factors is a sound economic tradeoff    Of course  the best organizations   achieve high motivation and process   sophistication at the same time  and   that is the key challenge for any   leading software organization       Read the article for an explanation of these acronyms

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There is no  one size fits all  approach to development  I m surprised that this is a controversial opinion  because it seems to me like common sense  However  there are many entries on popular blogs promoting the  one size fits all  approach to development so I think I may actually be in the minority   Things I ve seen being touted as the correct approach for any project - before any information is known about it - are things like the use of Test Driven Development  TDD   Domain Driven Design  DDD   Object-Relational Mapping  ORM   Agile  capital A   Object Orientation  OO   etc  etc  encompassing everything from methodologies to architectures to components  All with nice marketable acronyms  of course   People even seem to go as far as putting badges on their blogs such as  I m Test Driven  or similar  as if their strict adherence to a single approach whatever the details of the project project is actually a good thing    It isn t    Choosing the correct methodologies and architectures and components  etc   is something that should be done on a per-project basis  and depends not only on the type of project you re working on and its unique requirements  but also the size and ability of the team you re working with

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If you re a developer  you should be able to write code  I did quite a bit of interviewing last year  and for my part of the interview I was supposed to test the way people thought  and how they implemented simple-to-moderate algorithms on a white board  I d initially started out with questions like      Given that Pi can be estimated using the function 4    1 - 1 3   1 5 - 1 7        with more terms giving greater accuracy  write a function that calculates Pi to an accuracy of 5 decimal places    It s a problem that should make you think  but shouldn t be out of reach to a seasoned developer  it can be answered in about 10 lines of C    However  many of our  supposedly pre-screened by the agency  candidates couldn t even begin to answer it  or even explain how they might go about answering it  So after a while I started asking simpler questions like      Given the area of a circle is given by Pi times the radius squared  write a function to calculate the area of a circle    Amazingly  more than half the candidates couldn t write this function in any language  I can read most popular languages so I let them use any language of their choice  including pseudo-code   We had  C  developers  who could not write this function in C    I was surprised by this  I had always thought that developers should be able to write code  It seems that  nowadays  this is a controversial opinion  Certainly it is amongst interview candidates     Edit   There s a lot of discussion in the comments about whether the first question is a good or bad one  and whether you should ask questions as complex as this in an interview  I m not going to delve into this here  that s a whole new question  apart from to say you re largely missing the point of the post    Yes  I said people couldn t make any headway with this  but the second question is trivial and many people couldn t make any headway with that one either  Anybody who calls themselves a developer should be able to write the answer to the second one in a few seconds without even thinking  And many can t

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I m probably gonna get roasted for this  but   Making invisible characters syntactically significant in python was a bad idea  It s distracting  causes lots of subtle bugs for novices and  in my opinion  wasn t really needed  About the only code I ve ever seen that didn t voluntarily follow some sort of decent formatting guide was from first-year CS students  And even if code doesn t follow  nice  standards  there are plenty of tools out there to coerce it into a more pleasing shape

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PHP sucks  -   The proof is in the pudding

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Developers are all different  and should be treated as such   Developers don t fit into a box  and shouldn t be treated as such  The best language or tool for solving a problem has just as much to do with the developers as it does with the details of the problem being solved

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Developers should be able to modify production code without getting permission from anyone as long as they document their changes and notify the appropriate parties

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Realizing sometimes good enough is good enough  is a major jump in your value as a programmer   Note that when I say  good enough   I mean  good enough   not it s some crap that happens to work   But then again  when you are under a time crunch   some crap that happens to work   may be considered  good enough

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Don t use keywords for basic types if the language has the actual type exposed  In C   this would refer to bool  Boolean   int  Int32   float  Single   long  Int64    int    bool   etc are not actual parts of the language  but rather just  shortcuts  or  aliases  for the actual type  Don t use something that doesn t exist  And in my opinion  Int16  Int32  Int64  Boolean  etc makes a heck of a lot more sense then  short    long    int

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The best programmers trace all their code in the debugger and test all paths   Well    the OP said controversial

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Null references should be removed from OO languages  Coming from a Java and C  background  where its normal to return null from a method to indicate a failure  I ve come to conclude that nulls cause a lot of avoidable problems  Language designers can remove a whole class of errors relate to NullRefernceExceptions if they simply eliminate null references from code   Additionally  when I call a method  I have no way of knowing whether that method can return null references unless I actually dig in the implementation  I d like to see more languages follow F  s model for handling nulls  F  doesn t allow programmers to return null references  at least for classes compiled in F    instead it requires programmers to represent empty objects using option types  The nice thing about this design is how useful information  such as whether a function can return null references  is propagated through the type system  functions which return a type  a have a different return type than functions which return  a option

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Most developers don t have a clue  Yup    there you go  I ve said it  I find that from all the developers that I personally know    just a handful are actually good  Just a handful understand that code should be tested     that the Object Oriented approach to developing is actually there to help you  It frustrates me to no end that there are people who get the title of developer while in fact all they can do is copy and paste a bit of source code and then execute it   Anyway     I m glad initiatives like stackoverflow are being started  It s good for developers to wonder  Is there a better way  Am I doing it correctly  Perhaps I could use this technique to speed things up  etc      But nope     the majority of developers just learn a language that they are required by their job and stick with it until they themselves become old and grumpy developers that have no clue what s going on  All they ll get is a big paycheck since they are simply older than you   Ah well     life is unjust in the IT community and I ll be taking steps to ignore such people in the future  Hooray

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There are some  very few  legitimate uses for goto  particularly in C  as a stand-in for exception handling

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Lower camelCase is stupid and unsemantic  Using lower camelCase makes the name identifier   name  used from this point  look like a two-part thing  Upper CamelCase however  gives the clear indication that all the words belong together   Hungarian notation is different     because the first part of the name is a type indicator  and so it has a separate meaning from the rest of the name   Some might argue that lower camelCase should be used for functions procedures  especially inside classes  This is popular in Java and object oriented PHP  However  there is no reason to do that to indicate that they are class methods  because BY THE WAY THEY ARE ACCESSED it becomes more than clear that these are just that   Some code examples     Java myobj objMethod      doesn t the dot and parens indicate that objMethod is a method of myobj     PHP  myobj- gt objMethod      doesn t the pointer and parens indicate that objMethod is a method of myobj    Upper CamelCase is useful for class names  and other static names  All non-static content should be recognised by the way they are accessed  not by their name format     Here s my homogenous code example  where name behaviours are indicated by other things than their names     also  I prefer underscore to separate words in names      Java my obj   new MyObj     Clearly a class  since it s upper CamelCase my obj obj method     Clearly a method  since it s executed my obj obj var   Clearly an attribute  since it s referenced    PHP  my obj   new MyObj    my obj- gt obj method    my obj- gt obj var MyObj  MyStaticMethod      Python MyObj   MyClass   copies the reference of the class to a new name my obj   MyObj     Clearly a class  being instantiated my obj obj method     Clearly a method  since it s executed my obj obj var   clearly an attribute  since it s referenced my obj obj method   Also  an attribute  but holding the instance method  my method   myobj obj method   Instance method my method     Same as myobj obj method   MyClassMethod   MyObj obj method   Attribute holding the class method MyClassMethod myobj    Same as myobj obj method   MyClassMethod MyObj    Same as calling MyObj obj method   as a static classmethod   So there goes  my completely obsubjective opinion on camelCase

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Human brain is the master key to all locks   There is nothing in this world that can move faster your brain  Trust me this is not philosophical but practical  Well as far as opinions are concerned   they are as under    1  Never go outside the boundry specified in the programming language  A simple example would be pointers in C and C     Dont misuse them as you are likely to get the DAMN SEGMENTATION FAULT   2  Always follow the coding standards  yes what you are reading is correct  Coding standards do alot to your program  After all your program is written to be executed by machine but to be understood by some other brain

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I believe the use of try catch exception handling is worse than the use of simple return codes and associated common messaging structures to ferry useful error messages   Littering code with try catch blocks is not a solution   Just passing exceptions up the stack hoping whats above you will do the right thing or generate an informative error is not a solution   Thinking you have any chance of systematically verifying the proper exception handlers are avaliable to address anything that could go wrong in either transparent or opague objects is not realistic   Think also in terms of late bindings external libraries and unecessary dependancies between unrelated functions in a call stack as system evolves   Use of return codes are simple  can be easily systematically verified for coverage and if handled properly forces developers to generate useful error messages rather than the all-too-common stack dumps and obscure I O exceptions that are  exceptionally  meaningless to even the most clueful of end users   --  My final objection is the use of garbage collected languages   Don t get me wrong   I love them in some circumstances but in general for server MC systems they have no place in my view   GC is not infallable - even extremely well designed GC algorithms can hang on to objects too long or even forever based on non-obvious circular refrences in their dependancy graphs   Non-GC systems following a few simple patterns and use of memory accounting tools don t have this problem but do require more work in design and test upfront than GC environments   The tradeoff here is that memory leaks are extremely easy to spot during testing in Non-GC while finding GC related problem conditions is a much more difficult proposition   Memory is cheap but what happens when you leak expensive objects such as transaction handles  synchronization objects  socket connections   etc   In my environment the very thought that you can just sit back and let the language worry about this for you is unthinkable without significant fundental changes in software description

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MS Access  is a Real Development Tool and it can be used without shame by professional programmers  Just because a particular platform is a magnet for hacks and secretaries who think they are programmers shouldn t besmirch the platform itself   Every platform has its benefits and drawbacks   Programmers who bemoan certain platforms or tools or belittle them as  toys  are more likely to be far less knowledgable about their craft than their ego has convinced them they are  It is a definite sign of overconfidence for me to hear a programmer bash any environment that they have not personally used extensively enough to know well     Insert just about any maligned tool  VB  PHP  etc   here

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New web projects should consider not using Java   I ve been using Java to do web development for over 10 years now   At first  it was a step in the right direction compared to the available alternatives   Now  there are better alternatives than Java   This is really just a specific case of the magic hammer approach to problem solving  but it s one that s really painful

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You need to watch out for Object-Obsessed Programmers   e g  if you write a class that models built-in types such as ints or floats  you may be an object-obsessed programmer

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Debuggers should be forbidden  This would force people to write code that is testable through unit tests  and in the end would lead to much better code quality   Remove Copy  amp  Paste from ALL programming IDEs  Copy  amp  pasted code is very bad  this option should be completely removed  Then the programmer will hopefully be too lazy to retype all the code so he makes a function and reuses the code   Whenever you use a Singleton  slap yourself  Singletons are almost never necessary  and are most of the time just a fancy name for a global variable

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You shouldn t settle on the first way you find to code something that  works    I really don t think this should be controversial  but it is   People see an example from elsewhere in the code  from online  or from some old  Teach yourself Advanced Power SQLJava BeansServer in 3 14159 minutes  book dated 1999  and they think they know something and they copy it into their code   They don t walk through the example to find out what each line does   They don t think about the design of their program and see if there might be a more organized or more natural way to do the same thing   They don t make any attempt at keeping their skill sets up to date to learn that they are using ideas and methods deprecated in the last year of the previous millenium   They don t seem to have the experience to learn that what they re copying has created specific horrific maintenance burdens for programmers for years and that they can be avoided with a little more thought   In fact  they don t even seem to recognize that there might be more than one way to do something   I come from the Perl world  where one of the slogans is  There s More Than One Way To Do It    TMTOWTDI   People who ve taken a cursory look at Perl have written it off as  write-only  or  unreadable   largely because they ve looked at crappy code written by people with the mindset I described above   Those people have given zero thought to design  maintainability  organization  reduction of duplication in code  coupling  cohesion  encapsulation  etc   They write crap   Those people exist programming in every language  and easy to learn languages with many ways to do things give them plenty of rope and guns to shoot and hang themselves with   Simultaneously   But if you hang around the Perl world for longer than a cursory look  and watch what the long-timers in the community are doing  you see a remarkable thing  the good Perl programmers spend some time seeking to find the best way to do something   When they re naming a new module  they ask around for suggestions and bounce their ideas off of people   They hand their code out to get looked at  critiqued  and modified   If they have to do something nasty  they encapsulate it in the smallest way possible in a module for use in a more organized way   Several implementations of the same idea might hang around for awhile  but they compete for mindshare and marketshare  and they compete by trying to do the best job  and a big part of that is by making themselves easily maintainable   Really good Perl programmers seem to think hard about what they are doing and looking for the best way to do things  rather than just grabbing the first idea that flits through their brain   Today I program primarily in the Java world   I ve seen some really good Java code  but I see a lot of junk as well  and I see more of the mindset I described at the beginning  people settle on the first ugly lump of code that seems to work  without understanding it  without thinking if there s a better way   You will see both mindsets in every language   I m not trying to impugn Java specifically    Actually I really like it in some ways     maybe that should be my real controversial opinion    But I m coming to believe that every programmer needs to spend a good couple of years with a TMTOWTDI-style language  because even though conventional wisdom has it that this leads to chaos and crappy code  it actually seems to produce people who understand that you need to think about the repercussions of what you are doing instead of trusting your language to have been designed to make you do the right thing with no effort   I do think you can err too far in the other direction  i e   perfectionism that totally ignores your true needs and goals  often the true needs and goals of your business  which is usually profitability    But I don t think anyone can be a truly great programmer without learning to invest some greater-than-average effort in thinking about finding the best  or at least one of the best  way to code what they are doing

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80  of bugs are introduced in the design stage   The other 80  are introduced in the coding stage    This opinion was inspired by reading Dima Malenko s answer    Development is 80  about the design and 20  about coding   yes    This will produce code with near zero bugs   no

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Web applications suck  My Internet connection is veeery slow  My experience with almost every Web site that is not Google is  at least  frustrating  Why doesn t anybody write desktop apps anymore  Oh  I see  Nobody wants to be bothered with learning how operating systems work  At least  not Windows  The last time you had to handle WM PAINT  your head exploded  Creating a worker thread to perform a long task  I mean  doing it the Windows way  was totally beyond you  What the hell was a callback  Oh  my God     Garbage collection sucks  No  it actually doesn t  But it makes the programmers suck like nothing else  In college  the first language they taught us was Visual Basic  the original one   After that  there was another course where the teachers pretended they taught us C    But the damage was done  Nobody actually knew how to use this esoteric keyword delete did  After testing our programs  we either got invalid address exceptions or memory leaks  Sometimes  we got both  Among the 1  of my faculty who can actually program  only one who can manage his memory by himself  at least  he pretends  and he s writing this rant  The rest write their programs in VB NET  which  by definition  is a bad language     Dynamic typing suck  Unless you re using assembler  of course  that s the kind of dynamic typing that actually deserves praise   What I meant is the overhead imposed by dynamic  interpreted languages makes them suck  And don t come with that silly argument that different tools are good for different jobs  C is the right language for almost everything  it s fast  powerful and portable   and  when it isn t  it s not fast enough   there s always inline assembly     I might come up with more rants  but that will be later  not now

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The only  best practice  you should be using all the time is  Use Your Brain    Too many people jumping on too many bandwagons and trying to force methods  patterns  frameworks etc onto things that don t warrant them   Just because something is new  or because someone respected has an opinion  doesn t mean it fits all     EDIT  Just to clarify - I don t think people should ignore best practices  valued opinions etc  Just that people shouldn t just blindly jump on something without thinking about WHY this  thing  is so great  IS it applicable to what I m doing  and WHAT benefits drawbacks does it bring

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Correct every defect when it s discovered  Not just  severity 1  defects  all defects   Establish a deployment mechanism that makes application updates immediately available to users  but allows them to choose when to accept these updates  Establish a direct communication mechanism with users that enables them to report defects  relate their experience with updates  and suggest improvements   With aggressive testing  many defects can be discovered during the iteration in which they are created  immediately correcting them reduces developer interrupts  a significant contributor to defect creation  Immediately correcting defects reported by users forges a constructive community  replacing product quality with product improvement as the main topic of conversation   Implementing user-suggested improvements that are consistent with your vision and strategy produces community of enthusiastic evangelists

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Relational database systems will be the best thing since sliced bread         when we  hopefully  get them  that is   SQL databases suck so hard it s not funny   What I find amusing  if sad  is certified DBAs who think an SQL database system is a relational one   Speaks volumes for the quality of said certification   Confused   Read C  J  Date s books   edit  Why is it called Relational and what does that word mean   These days  a programmer  or a certified DBA  wink  with a strong  heck  any  mathematical background is an exception rather than the common case  I m an instance of the common case as well    SQL with its tables  columns and rows  as well as the joke called Entity Relationship Modelling just add insult to the injury   No wonder the misconception that Relational Database Systems are called that because of some Relationships  Foreign Keys   between Entities  tables  is so pervasive   In fact  Relational derives from the mathematical concept of relations  and as such is intimately related to set theory and functions  in the mathematical  not any programming  sense     http   en wikipedia org wiki Finitary relation  2       In mathematics  more specifically  in set theory and logic   a relation is a property that assigns truth values to combinations  k-tuples  of k individuals  Typically  the property describes a possible connection between the components of a k-tuple  For a given set of k-tuples  a truth value is assigned to each k-tuple according to whether the property does or does not hold       An example of a ternary relation  i e   between three individuals  is   X was-introduced-to Y by Z   where  X Y Z  is a 3-tuple of persons  for example   Beatrice Wood was introduced to Henri-Pierre Roch   by Marcel Duchamp  is true  while  Karl Marx was introduced to Friedrich Engels by Queen Victoria  is false    Wikipedia makes it perfectly clear  in a SQL DBMS  such a ternary relation would be a  table   not a  foreign key   I m taking the liberty to rename the  columns  of the relation  X   who  Y   to  Z   by    CREATE TABLE introduction     who INDIVIDUAL NOT NULL   to INDIVIDUAL NOT NULL   by INDIVIDUAL NOT NULL   PRIMARY KEY  who  to  by       Also  it would contain  among others  possibly   this  row    INSERT INTO introduction     who   to   by   VALUES      Beatrice Wood     Henri-Pierre Roch       Marcel Duchamp       but not this one   INSERT INTO introduction     who   to   by   VALUES      Karl Marx     Friedrich Engels     Queen Victoria       Relational Database Dictionary      relation  mathematics  Given sets s1  s2       sn  not necessarily distinct  r is a relation on those sets if and only if it s a set of n-tuples each of which has its first element from s1  its second element from s2  and so on    Equivalently  r is a subset of the Cartesian product s1 x s2 x     x sn        Set si is the ith domain of r  i   1       n    Note  There are several important logical differences between relations in mathematics and their relational model counterparts   Here are some of them          Mathematical relations have a left-to-right ordering to their attributes    Actually  mathematical relations have  at best  only a very rudimentary concept of attributes anyway   Certainly their attributes aren t named  other than by their ordinal position    As a consequence  mathematical relations don t really have either a heading or a type in the relational model sense    Mathematical relations are usually either binary or  just occasionally  unary   By contrast  relations in the relational model are of degree n  where n can be any nonnegative integer    Relational operators such as JOIN  EXTEND  and the rest were first defined in the context of the relational model specifically  the mathematical theory of relations includes few such operators          And so on  the foregoing isn t meant to be an exhaustive list

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VB 6 could be used for good as well as evil  It was a Rapid Application Development environment in a time of over complicated coding   I have hated VB vehemently in the past  and still mock VB NET  probably in jest  as a Fisher Price language due to my dislike of classical VB  but in its day  nothing could beat it for getting the job done

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It s okay to be Mort  Not everyone is a  rockstar  programmer  some of us do it because it s a good living  and we don t care about all the latest fads and trends  we just want to do our jobs

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HTML 5   JavaScript will be the most used UI programming platform of the future Flash Silverlight Java Applets etc  etc  are all going to die a silent death

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Making software configurable is a bad idea   Configurable software allows the end-user  or admin etc  to choose too many options  which may not all have been tested together  or rather  if there are more than a very small number  I can guarantee will not have been tested    So I think software which has its configuration hard-coded  but not necessarily shunning constants etc  to JUST WORK is a good idea  Run with sensible defaults  and DO NOT ALLOW THEM TO BE CHANGED   A good example of this is the number of configuration options on Google Chrome - however  this is probably still too many

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C   is future killer language         of dynamic languages   nobody owns it  has a growing set of features like compile-time  meta- programming or type inference  callbacks without the overhead of function calls  doesn t enforce a single approach  multi-paradigm    POSIX and ECMAScript regular expressions   multiple return values   you can have named arguments   etc etc   things move really slowly in programming   it took JavaScript 10 years to get off the ground  mostly because of performance   and most of people who program in it still don t get it  classes in JS  c mon     i d say C   will really start shining in 15-20 years from now   that seems to me like about the right amount of time for C    the language as well as compiler vendors  and critical mass of programmers who today write in dynamic languages to converge   C   needs to become more programmer-friendly  compiler errors generated from templates or compile times in the presence of same   and the programmers need to realize that static typing is a boon  it s already in progress  see other answer here which asserts that good code written in a dynamically typed language is written as if the language was statically typed

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Python does everything that other programming languages do in half the dev time    and so does Google    Check out Unladen Swallow if you disagree   Wait  this is a fact  Does it still qualify as an answer to this question

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Cowboy coders get more done   I spend my life in the startup atmosphere  Without the Cowboy coders we d waste endless cycles making sure things are done  right    As we know it s basically impossible to forsee all issues  The Cowboy coder runs head-on into these problems and is forced to solve them much more quickly than someone who tries to forsee them all   Though  if you re Cowboy coding you had better refactor that spaghetti before someone else has to maintain it     The best ones I know use continuous refactoring  They get a ton of stuff done  don t waste time trying to predict the future  and through refactoring it becomes maintainable code   Process always gets in the way of a good Cowboy  no matter how Agile it is

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There s an awful lot of bad teaching out there   We developers like to feel smugly superior when Joel says there s a part of the brain for understanding pointers that some people are just born without  The topics many of us discuss here and are passionate about are esoteric  but sometimes that s only because we make them so

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Software development is just a job  Don t get me wrong  I enjoy software development a lot  I ve written a blog for the last few years on the subject  I ve spent enough time on here to have  5000 reputation points  And I work in a start-up doing typically 60 hour weeks for much less money than I could get as a contractor because the team is fantastic and the work is interesting   But in the grand scheme of things  it is just a job   It ranks in importance below many things such as family  my girlfriend  friends  happiness etc   and below other things I d rather be doing if I had an unlimited supply of cash such as riding motorbikes  sailing yachts  or snowboarding   I think sometimes a lot of developers forget that developing is just something that allows us to have the more important things in life  and to have them by doing something we enjoy  rather than being the end goal in itself

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80  of bugs are introduced in the design stage   The other 80  are introduced in the coding stage    This opinion was inspired by reading Dima Malenko s answer    Development is 80  about the design and 20  about coding   yes    This will produce code with near zero bugs   no

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That best practices are a hazard because they ask us to substitute slogans for thinking

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Good Performance VS Elegant Design  They are not mutually exclusive but I can t stand over-designed class structures frameworks that completely have no clue about performance  I don t need to have a string of new This new That new Whatever      to create an object that will tell me it s 5 AM in the morning oh by the way  it s 217 days until Obama s birthday  and the weekend is 2 days away  I only wanted to know if the gym was open   Having balance between the 2 are crucial  The code needs to get nasty when you need to pump out all the processor do something intensive such as reading terabytes of data  Save the elegance for the places that consume the 10  of resources which is probably more than 90  of the code

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There are far too many programmers who write far too much code

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Software development is just a job  Don t get me wrong  I enjoy software development a lot  I ve written a blog for the last few years on the subject  I ve spent enough time on here to have  5000 reputation points  And I work in a start-up doing typically 60 hour weeks for much less money than I could get as a contractor because the team is fantastic and the work is interesting   But in the grand scheme of things  it is just a job   It ranks in importance below many things such as family  my girlfriend  friends  happiness etc   and below other things I d rather be doing if I had an unlimited supply of cash such as riding motorbikes  sailing yachts  or snowboarding   I think sometimes a lot of developers forget that developing is just something that allows us to have the more important things in life  and to have them by doing something we enjoy  rather than being the end goal in itself

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Variable Names With Bloody Underscores  or even worse  CAPITALIZED VARIABLE NAMES WITH BLOODY UNDERSCORES  should be globally expunged    with prejudice  CamelCapsAreJustFine   Glolbal constants not withstanding   GOTO statements are for use by developers under the age of 11  Any language that does not support pointers is not worthy of the name   Net    Bloat The finest example of microsoft s efforts for web site development  Expressionless Web 2  is the finest example of slow bloated cr pw re ever written   try Web Studio instead   Response  OK well let me address the Underscore issue a little  From the C link you provided   -Global constants should be all caps with     separators   This I actually agree with because it is so BLOODY OBVIOUS  -Take for example NetworkABCKey  Notice how the C from ABC and K from key are confused  Some people don t mind this and others just hate it so you ll find different policies in different code so you never know what to call something    I fall into the former category  I choose names VERY carefully and if you cannot figure out in one glance that the K belongs to Key then english is probably not your first language    C Function Names   In a C   project there should be very few C functions  For C functions use the GNU convention of all lower case letters with     as the word delimiter      Justification    It makes C functions very different from any C   related names     Example  int    some bloody function              These  standards  and conventions are simply the arbitrary decisions handed down through time  I think that while they make a certain amount of logical sense  They clutter up code and make something that should be short and sweet to read  clumsy  long winded and cluttered   C has been adopted as the de-facto standard  not because it is friendly  but because it is pervasive  I can write 100 lines of C code in 20 with a syntactically friendly high level language   This makes the program flow easy to read  and as we all know  revisiting code after a year or more means following the breadcrumb trail all over the place    I do use underscores but for global variables only as they are few and far between and they stick out clearly  Other than that  a well thought out CamelCaps   function  variable name has yet to let me down

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I firmly believe that unmanaged code isn t worth the trouble   The extra maintainability expenses associated with hunting down memory leaks which even the best programmers introduce occasionally far outweigh the performance to be gained from a language like C     If Java  C   etc  can t get the performance you need  buy more machines

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Inheritance is evil and should be deprecated   The truth is aggregation is better in all cases  Static typed OOP languages can t avoid inheritance  it s the only way to describe what method wants from a type  But dynamic languages and duck typing can live without it  Ruby mixins is much more powerful then inheritance and a lot more controllable

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I firmly believe that unmanaged code isn t worth the trouble   The extra maintainability expenses associated with hunting down memory leaks which even the best programmers introduce occasionally far outweigh the performance to be gained from a language like C     If Java  C   etc  can t get the performance you need  buy more machines

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Write your spec when you are finished coding   if at all   In many projects I have been involved in  a great deal of effort was spent at the outset writing a  spec  in Microsoft Word  This process culminated in a  sign off  meeting when the big shots bought in on the project  and after that meeting nobody ever looked at this document again  These documents are a complete waste of time and don t reflect how software is actually designed  This is not to say there are not other valuable artifacts of application design  They are usually contained on index cards  snapshots of whiteboards  cocktail napkins and other similar media that provide a kind of timeline for the app design  These are usually are the real specs of the app  If you are going to write a Word document   and I am not particularly saying you should  do it at the end of the project  At least it will accurately represent what has been done in the code and might help someone down the road like the the QA team or the next version developers

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Arrays should by default be 1-based rather than 0-based   This is not necessarily the case with system implementation languages  but languages like Java swallowed more C oddities than they should have    Element 1  should be the first element  not the second  to avoid confusion   Computer science is not software development   You wouldn t hire an engineer who studied only physics  after all   Learn as much mathematics as is feasible   You won t use most of it  but you need to be able to think that way to be good at software   The single best programming language yet standardized is Common Lisp  even if it is verbose and has zero-based arrays   That comes largely from being designed as a way to write computations  rather than as an abstraction of a von Neumann machine   At least 90  of all comparative criticism of programming languages can be reduced to  Language A has feature C  and I don t know how to do C or something equivalent in Language B  so Language A is better     Best practices  is the most impressive way to spell  mediocrity  I ve ever seen

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Design patterns are hurting good design more than they re helping it   IMO software design  especially good software design is far too varied to be meaningfully captured in patterns  especially in the small number of patterns people can actually remember - and they re far too abstract for people to really remember more than a handful  So they re not helping much   And on the other hand  far too many people become enamoured with the concept and try to apply patterns everywhere - usually  in the resulting code you can t find the actual design between all the  completely meaningless  Singletons and Abstract Factories

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Variable Names With Bloody Underscores  or even worse  CAPITALIZED VARIABLE NAMES WITH BLOODY UNDERSCORES  should be globally expunged    with prejudice  CamelCapsAreJustFine   Glolbal constants not withstanding   GOTO statements are for use by developers under the age of 11  Any language that does not support pointers is not worthy of the name   Net    Bloat The finest example of microsoft s efforts for web site development  Expressionless Web 2  is the finest example of slow bloated cr pw re ever written   try Web Studio instead   Response  OK well let me address the Underscore issue a little  From the C link you provided   -Global constants should be all caps with     separators   This I actually agree with because it is so BLOODY OBVIOUS  -Take for example NetworkABCKey  Notice how the C from ABC and K from key are confused  Some people don t mind this and others just hate it so you ll find different policies in different code so you never know what to call something    I fall into the former category  I choose names VERY carefully and if you cannot figure out in one glance that the K belongs to Key then english is probably not your first language    C Function Names   In a C   project there should be very few C functions  For C functions use the GNU convention of all lower case letters with     as the word delimiter      Justification    It makes C functions very different from any C   related names     Example  int    some bloody function              These  standards  and conventions are simply the arbitrary decisions handed down through time  I think that while they make a certain amount of logical sense  They clutter up code and make something that should be short and sweet to read  clumsy  long winded and cluttered   C has been adopted as the de-facto standard  not because it is friendly  but because it is pervasive  I can write 100 lines of C code in 20 with a syntactically friendly high level language   This makes the program flow easy to read  and as we all know  revisiting code after a year or more means following the breadcrumb trail all over the place    I do use underscores but for global variables only as they are few and far between and they stick out clearly  Other than that  a well thought out CamelCaps   function  variable name has yet to let me down

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VB sucks While not terribly controversial in general  when you work in a VB house it is

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The best programmers trace all their code in the debugger and test all paths   Well    the OP said controversial

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BAD IDE s make the programming language weak  Good programming IDEs really make working with certain languages easier and better to oversee  I have been bit spoiled in my professional carreer  the companies I worked for always had the latest Visual Studio s ready to use   For about 8 months  I have been doing a lot of Cocoa next to my work and the Xcode editor makes working with that language just way too difficult  Overloads are difficult to find and the overal way of handling open files just makes your screen really messy  really fast  It s really a shame  because Cocoa is a cool and powerful language to work with   Ofcourse die-hard Xcode fans will now vote down my post  but there are so many IDEs that are really a lot better   People making a switch to IT  who just shouldn t  This is a copy paste from a blog post of mine  made last year     The experiences I have are mainly about the dutch market  but they also might apply to any other market   We  as I group all Software Engineers together  are currently in a market that might look very good for us  Companies are desperately trying to get Software Engineers  from now on SE    no matter the price  If you switch jobs now  you can demand almost anything you want  In the Netherlands there is a trend now to even give 2 lease cars with a job  just to get you to work for them  How weird is that  How am I gonna drive 2 cars at the same time    Of course this sounds very good for us  but this also creates a very unhealthy situation    For example  If you are currently working for a company which is growing fast and you are trying to attract more co-workers  to finally get some serious software development from the ground  there is no-one to be found without offering sky high salaries  Trying to find quality co-workers is very hard  A lot of people are attracted to our kind of work  because of the good salaries  but this also means that a lot of people without the right passion are entering our market   Passion  yes  I think that is the right word  When you have passion for your job  your job won   t stop at 05 00 PM  You will keep refreshing all of your development RSS feeds all night  You will search the internet for the latest technologies that might be interesting to use at work  And you will start about a dozen new    promising    projects a month  just to see if you can master that latest technology you just read about a couple of weeks ago  and find an useful way of actually using that technology    Without that passion  the market might look very nice  because of the cars  money and of course the hot girls we attract   but I don   t think it will be that interesting very long as  let   s say  fireman or fighter-pilot   It might sound that I am trying to protect my own job here and partly that is true  But I am also trying to protect myself against the people I don   t want to work with  I want to have heated discussions about stuff I read about  I want to be able to spar with people that have the same    passion    for the job as I have  I want colleagues that are working with me for the right reasons   Where are those people I am looking for

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Exceptions considered harmful

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Never implement anything as a singleton   You can decide not to construct more than one instance  but always ensure you implementation can handle more   I have yet to find any scenario where using a singleton  is actually the right thing to do   I got into some very heated discussions over this in the last few years  but in the end I was always right

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Zealous adherence to standards stands in the way of simplicity   MVC is over-rated for websites   It s mostly just VC  sometimes M

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Code layout does matter  Maybe specifics of brace position should remain purely religious arguments - but it doesn t mean that all layout styles are equal  or that there are no objective factors at all   The trouble is that the uber-rule for layout  namely   be consistent   sound as it is  is used as a crutch by many to never try to see if their default style can be improved on - and that  furthermore  it doesn t even matter   A few years ago I was studying Speed Reading techniques  and some of the things I learned about how the eye takes in information in  fixations   can most optimally scan pages  and the role of subconsciously picking up context  got me thinking about how this applied to code - and writing code with it in mind especially   It led me to a style that tended to be columnar in nature  with identifiers logically grouped and aligned where possible  in particular I became strict about having each method argument on its own line   However  rather than long columns of unchanging structure it s actually beneficial to vary the structure in blocks so that you end up with rectangular islands that the eye can take in in a single fixture - even if you don t consciously read every character   The net result is that  once you get used to it  which typically takes 1-3 days  it becomes pleasing to the eye  easier and faster to comprehend  and is less taxing on the eyes and brain because it s laid out in a way that makes it easier to take in   Almost without exception  everyone I have asked to try this style  including myself  initially said   ugh I hate it    but after a day or two said   I love it - I m finding it hard not to go back and rewrite all my old stuff this way     I ve been hoping to find the time to do more controlled experiments to collect together enough evidence to write a paper on  but as ever have been too busy with other things  However this seemed like a good opportunity to mention it to people interested in controversial techniques  -    Edit   I finally got around to blogging about this  after many years parked in the  meaning to  phase   Part one  Part two  Part three

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Opinion  Duration in the development field does not always mean the same as experience   Many trades look at  years of experience  in a language   Yes  5 years of C  can make sense since you may learn new tricks and what not  However  if you are with the company and maintaining the same code base for a number of years  I feel as if you are not gaining the amount of exposure to different situations as a person who works on different situations and client needs     I once interviewed a person who prided himself on having 10 years of programming experience and worked with VB5  6  and VB Net   all in the same company during that time   After more probing  I found out that while he worked with all of those versions of VB  he was only upgrading and constantly maintaining his original VB5 app   Never modified the architecture and let the upgrade wizards do their thing   I have interviewed people who only have 2 years in the field but have worked on multiple projects that have more  experience  than him

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Inversion of control does not eliminate dependencies  but it sure does a great job of hiding them

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It s fine if you don t know  But you re fired if you can t even google it   Internet is a tool  It s not making you stupider if you re learning from it

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For a good programmer language is not a problem   It may be not very controvertial but I hear a lot o whining from other programmers like  why don t they all use delphi     C  sucks    i would change company if they forced me to use java  and so on  What i think is that a good programmer is flexible and is able to write good programms in any programming language that he might have to learn in his life

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Don t comment your code  Comments are not code and therefore when things change it s very easy to not change the comment that explained the code   Instead I prefer to refactor the crap out of code to a point that there is no reason for a comment   An example   if data    null      First time on the page   to   bool firstTimeOnPage   data    null  if firstTimeOnPage    The only time I really comment is when it s a TODO or explaining why  Widget GetData       only way to grab data  TODO  extract interface or wrapper

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Source Control  Anything But SourceSafe  Also  Exclusive locking is evil   I once worked somewhere where they argued that exclusive locks meant that you were guaranteeing that people were not overwriting someone else s changes when you checked in  The problem was that in order to get any work done  if a file was locked devs would just change their local file to writable and merging  or overwriting  the source control with their version when they had the chance

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Debuggers should be forbidden  This would force people to write code that is testable through unit tests  and in the end would lead to much better code quality   Remove Copy  amp  Paste from ALL programming IDEs  Copy  amp  pasted code is very bad  this option should be completely removed  Then the programmer will hopefully be too lazy to retype all the code so he makes a function and reuses the code   Whenever you use a Singleton  slap yourself  Singletons are almost never necessary  and are most of the time just a fancy name for a global variable

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I work in ASP NET   VB NET a lot and find ViewState an absolute nightmare   It s enabled by default on the majority of fields and causes a large quantity of encoded data at the start of every web page   The bigger a page gets in terms of controls on a page  the larger the ViewState data will become   Most people don t turn an eye to it  but it creates a large set of data which is usually irrelevant to the tasks being carried on the page   You must manually disable this option on all ASP controls if they re not being used   It s either that or have custom controls for everything   On some pages I work with  half of the page is made up of ViewState  which is a shame really as there s probably better ways of doing it   That s just one small example I can think of in terms of language technology opinions   It may be controversial   By the way  you might want to edit voting on this thread  it could get quite heated by some

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Code layout does matter  Maybe specifics of brace position should remain purely religious arguments - but it doesn t mean that all layout styles are equal  or that there are no objective factors at all   The trouble is that the uber-rule for layout  namely   be consistent   sound as it is  is used as a crutch by many to never try to see if their default style can be improved on - and that  furthermore  it doesn t even matter   A few years ago I was studying Speed Reading techniques  and some of the things I learned about how the eye takes in information in  fixations   can most optimally scan pages  and the role of subconsciously picking up context  got me thinking about how this applied to code - and writing code with it in mind especially   It led me to a style that tended to be columnar in nature  with identifiers logically grouped and aligned where possible  in particular I became strict about having each method argument on its own line   However  rather than long columns of unchanging structure it s actually beneficial to vary the structure in blocks so that you end up with rectangular islands that the eye can take in in a single fixture - even if you don t consciously read every character   The net result is that  once you get used to it  which typically takes 1-3 days  it becomes pleasing to the eye  easier and faster to comprehend  and is less taxing on the eyes and brain because it s laid out in a way that makes it easier to take in   Almost without exception  everyone I have asked to try this style  including myself  initially said   ugh I hate it    but after a day or two said   I love it - I m finding it hard not to go back and rewrite all my old stuff this way     I ve been hoping to find the time to do more controlled experiments to collect together enough evidence to write a paper on  but as ever have been too busy with other things  However this seemed like a good opportunity to mention it to people interested in controversial techniques  -    Edit   I finally got around to blogging about this  after many years parked in the  meaning to  phase   Part one  Part two  Part three

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I ve been burned for broadcasting these opinions in public before  but here goes   Well-written code in dynamically typed languages follows static-typing conventions  Having used Python  PHP  Perl  and a few other dynamically typed languages  I find that well-written code in these languages follows static typing conventions  for example    Its considered bad style to re-use a variable with different types  for example  its bad style to take a list variable and assign an int  then assign the variable a bool in the same method   Well-written code in dynamically typed languages doesn t mix types  A type-error in a statically typed language is still a type-error in a dynamically typed language  Functions are generally designed to operate on a single datatype at a time  so that a function which accepts a parameter of type T can only sensibly be used with objects of type T or subclasses of T  Functions designed to operator on many different datatypes are written in a way that constrains parameters to a well-defined interface  In general terms  if two objects of types A and B perform a similar function  but aren t subclasses of one another  then they almost certainly implement the same interface    While dynamically typed languages certainly provide more than one way to crack a nut  most well-written  idiomatic code in these languages pays close attention to types just as rigorously as code written in statically typed languages   Dynamic typing does not reduce the amount of code programmers need to write  When I point out how peculiar it is that so many static-typing conventions cross over into dynamic typing world  I usually add  so why use dynamically typed languages to begin with     The immediate response is something along the lines of being able to write more terse  expressive code  because dynamic typing allows programmers to omit type annotations and explicitly defined interfaces  However  I think the most popular statically typed languages  such as C   Java  and Delphi  are bulky by design  not as a result of their type systems   I like to use languages with a real type system like OCaml  which is not only statically typed  but its type inference and structural typing allow programmers to omit most type annotations and interface definitions   The existence of the ML family of languages demostrates that we can enjoy the benefits of static typing with all the brevity of writing in a dynamically typed language  I actually use OCaml s REPL for ad hoc  throwaway scripts in exactly the same way everyone else uses Perl or Python as a scripting language

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Java Sucks  - yeah  I know that opinion is definitely not held by all     I have that opinion because the majority of Java applications I ve seen are memory hogs  run slowly  horrible user interface and so on   G-Man

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A degree in computer science does not---and is not supposed to---teach you to be a programmer   Programming is a trade  computer science is a field of study   You can be a great programmer and a poor computer scientist and a great computer scientist and an awful programmer   It is important to understand the difference   If you want to be a programmer  learn Java   If you want to be a computer scientist  learn at least three almost completely different languages   e g   assembler  c  lisp  ruby  smalltalk

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Opinion  Unit tests don t need to be written up front  and sometimes not at all   Reasoning  Developers suck at testing their own code  We do  That s why we generally have test teams or QA groups   Most of the time the code we write is to intertwined with other code to be tested separately  so we end up jumping through patterned hoops to provide testability  Not that those patterns are bad  but they can sometimes add unnecessary complexity  all for the sake of unit testing         which often doesn t work anyway  To write a comprehensive unit test requires alot of time  Often more time than we re willing to give  And the more comprehensive the test  the more brittle it becomes if the interface of the thing it s testing changes  forcing a rewrite of a test that no longer compiles

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You can t measure productivity by counting lines of code   Everyone knows this  but for some reason the practice still persists

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Emacs is better

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Opinion  Data driven design puts the cart before the horse  It should be eliminated from our thinking forthwith   The vast majority of software isn t about the data  it s about the business problem we re trying to solve for our customers  It s about a problem domain  which involves objects  rules  flows  cases  and relationships    When we start our design with the data  and model the rest of the system after the data and the relationships between the data  tables  foreign keys  and x-to-x relationships   we constrain the entire application to how the data is stored in and retrieved from the database  Further  we expose the database architecture to the software   The database schema is an implementation detail  We should be free to change it without having to significantly alter the design of our software at all  The business layer should never have to know how the tables are set up  or if it s pulling from a view or a table  or getting the table from dynamic SQL or a stored procedure  And that type of code should never appear in the presentation layer   Software is about solving business problems  We deal with users  cars  accounts  balances  averages  summaries  transfers  animals  messsages  packages  carts  orders  and all sorts of other real tangible objects  and the actions we can perform on them  We need to save  load  update  find  and delete those items as needed  Sometimes  we have to do those things in special ways    But there s no real compelling reason that we should take the work that should be done in the database and move it away from the data and put it in the source code  potentially on a separate machine  introducing network traffic and degrading performance   Doing so means turning our backs on the decades of work that has already been done to improve the performance of stored procedures and functions built into databases  The argument that stored procedures introduce  yet another API  to be manged is specious  of course it does  that API is a facade that shields you from the database schema  including the intricate details of primary and foreign keys  transactions  cursors  and so on  and it prevents you from having to splice SQL together in your source code   Put the horse back in front of the cart  Think about the problem domain  and design the solution around it  Then  derive the data from the problem domain

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Programmers need to talk to customers  Some programmers believe that they don t need to be the ones talking to customers  It s a sure way for your company to write something absolutely brilliant which no one can work out what it s for or how it was intended to be used   You can t expect product managers and business analysts to make all the decisions  In fact  programmers should be making 990 out of the 1000  often small  decisions that go into creating a module or feature  otherwise the product would simply never ship  So make sure your decisions are informed  Understand your customers  work with them  watch them use your software   If you re going the write the best code  you want people to use it  Take an interest in your user base and learn from the  dumb idiots  who are out there  Don t be afraid  they ll actually love you for it

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A good developer needs to know more than just how to code

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Most developers don t have a clue  Yup    there you go  I ve said it  I find that from all the developers that I personally know    just a handful are actually good  Just a handful understand that code should be tested     that the Object Oriented approach to developing is actually there to help you  It frustrates me to no end that there are people who get the title of developer while in fact all they can do is copy and paste a bit of source code and then execute it   Anyway     I m glad initiatives like stackoverflow are being started  It s good for developers to wonder  Is there a better way  Am I doing it correctly  Perhaps I could use this technique to speed things up  etc      But nope     the majority of developers just learn a language that they are required by their job and stick with it until they themselves become old and grumpy developers that have no clue what s going on  All they ll get is a big paycheck since they are simply older than you   Ah well     life is unjust in the IT community and I ll be taking steps to ignore such people in the future  Hooray

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Enable multiple checkout If we improve enough discipline of the developers  we will get much more efficiency from this setting by auto merge of source control

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Objects Should Never Be In An Invalid State  Unfortunately  so many of the ORM framework mandate zero-arg constructors for all entity classes  using setters to populate the member variables  In those cases  it s very difficult to know which setters must be called in order to construct a valid object   MyClass c   new MyClass       Object in invalid state  Doesn t have an ID  c setId 12345      Now object is valid    In my opinion  it should be impossible for an object to ever find itself in an invalid state  and the class s API should actively enforce its class invariants after every method call   Constructors and mutator methods should atomically transition an object from one valid state to another  This is much better   MyClass c   new MyClass 12345      Object starts out valid  Stays valid    As the consumer of some library  it s a huuuuuuge pain to keep track of whether all the right setters have been invoked before attempting to use an object  since the documentation usually provides no clues about the class s contract

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Linq2Sql is not that bad  I ve come across a lot of posts trashing Linq2Sql  I know it s not perfect  but what is   Personally  I think it has its drawbacks  but overall it can be great for prototyping  or for developing small to medium apps  When I consider how much time it has saved me from writing boring DAL code  I can t complain  especially considering the alternatives we had not so long ago

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Believe it or not  my belief that  in an OO language  most of the  business logic  code that operates on a class s data should be in the class itself is heresy on my team

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Managers know everything  It s been my experience that managers didn t get there by knowing code usually   No matter what you tell them it s too long  not right or too expensive   And another that follows on from the first   There s never time to do it right but there s always time to do it again  A good engineer friend once said that in anger to describe a situation where management halved his estimates  got a half-assed version out of him  then gave him twice as much time to rework it because it failed   It s a fairly regular thing in the commercial software world   And one that came to mind today while trying to configure a router with only a web interface   Web interfaces are for suckers  The CLI on the previous version of the firmware was oh so nice   This version has a web interface  which attempts to hide all of the complexity of networking from clueless IT droids  and can t even get VLANs correct

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Relational Databases are a waste of time  Use object databases instead   Relational database vendors try to fool us into believing that the only scaleable  persistent and safe storage in the world is relational databases  I am a certified DBA  Have you ever spent hours trying to optimize a query and had no idea what was going wrong  Relational databases don t let you make your own  search paths when you need them  You give away much of the control over the speed of your app into the hands of people you ve never met and they are not as smart as you think    Sure  sometimes in a well-maintained database they come up with a quick answer for a complex query  But the price you pay for this is too high  You have to choose between writing raw SQL every time you want to read an entry of your data  which is dangerous  Or use an Object relational mapper which adds more complexity and things outside your control    More importantly  you are actively forbidden from coming up with smart search algorithms  because every damn roundtrip to the database costs you around 11ms  It is too much  Imagine you know this super-graph algorithm which will answer a specific question  which might not even be expressible in SQL   in due time  But even if your algorithm is linear  and interesting algorithms are not linear  forget about combining it with a relational database as enumerating a large table will take you hours   Compare that with SandstoneDb  or Gemstone for Smalltalk  If you are into Java  give db4o a shot    So  my advice is  Use an object-DB  Sure  they aren t perfect and some queries will be slower  But you will be surprised how many will be faster  Because loading the objects will not require all these strange transofmations between SQL and your domain data  And if you really need speed for a certain query  object databases have the query optimizer you should trust  your brain

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Rob Pike wrote   Data dominates  If you ve chosen the right data structures and organized things well  the algorithms will almost always be self-evident  Data structures  not algorithms  are central to programming     And since these days any serious data is in the millions of records  I content that good data modeling is the most important programming skill  whether using a rdbms or something like sqlite or amazon simpleDB or google appengine data storage      Fancy search and sorting algorithms aren t needed any more when the data  all the data  is stored in such a data storage system

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A picture is not worth a thousand words   Some pictures might be worth a thousand words   Most of them are not   This trite old aphorism is mostly untrue and is a pathetic excuse for many a lazy manager who did not want to read carefully created reports and documentation to say  I need you to show me in a diagram    My wife studied for a linguistics major and saw several fascinating proofs against the conventional wisdom on pictures and logos  they do not break across language and cultural barriers  they usually do not communicate anywhere near as much information as correct text  they simply are no substitute for real communication   In particular  labeled bubbles connected with lines are useless if the lines are unlabeled and unexplained  and or if every line has a different meaning instead of signifying the same relationship  unless distinguished from each other in some way    If your lines sometimes signify relationships and sometimes indicate actions and sometimes indicate the passage of time  you re really hosed   Every good programmer knows you use the tool suited for the job at hand  right   Not all systems are best specified and documented in pictures   Graphical specification languages that can be automatically turned into provably-correct  executable code or whatever are a spectacular idea  if such things exist   Use them when appropriate  not for everything under the sun   Entity-Relationship diagrams are great   But not everything can be summed up in a picture   Note  a table may be worth its weight in gold   But a table is not the same thing as a picture   And again  a well-crafted short prose paragraph may be far more suitable for the job at hand

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The code is the design

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Programming is so easy a five year old can do it   Programming in and of itself is not hard  it s common sense  You are just telling a computer what to do    You re not a genius  please get over yourself

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The code is the design

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If I were being controversial  I d have to suggest that Jon Skeet isn t omnipotent

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Goto is OK   is that controversial enough  Sometimes    so give us the choice  For example  BASH doesn t have goto  Maybe there is some internal reason for this but still  Also  goto is the building block of Assembly language  No if statements for you

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Okay  I said I d give a bit more detail on my  sealed classes  opinion  I guess one way to show the kind of answer I m interested in is to give one myself     Opinion  Classes should be sealed by default in C   Reasoning   There s no doubt that inheritance is powerful  However  it has to be somewhat guided  If someone derives from a base class in a way which is completely unexpected  this can break the assumptions in the base implementation  Consider two methods in the base class  where one calls another - if these methods are both virtual  then that implementation detail has to be documented  otherwise someone could quite reasonably override the second method and expect a call to the first one to work  And of course  as soon as the implementation is documented  it can t be changed    so you lose flexibility   C  took a step in the right direction  relative to Java  by making methods sealed by default  However  I believe a further step - making classes sealed by default - would have been even better  In particular  it s easy to override methods  or not explicitly seal existing virtual methods which you don t override  so that you end up with unexpected behaviour  This wouldn t actually stop you from doing anything you can currently do - it s just changing a default  not changing the available options  It would be a  safer  default though  just like the default access in C  is always  the most private visibility available at that point    By making people explicitly state that they wanted people to be able to derive from their classes  we d be encouraging them to think about it a bit more  It would also help me with my laziness problem - while I know I should be sealing almost all of my classes  I rarely actually remember to do so     Counter-argument   I can see an argument that says that a class which has no virtual methods can be derived from relatively safely without the extra inflexibility and documentation usually required   I m not sure how to counter this one at the moment  other than to say that I believe the harm of accidentally-unsealed classes is greater than that of accidentally-sealed ones

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If you have any idea how to program you are not fit to place a button on a form  Is that controversial enough      No matter how hard we try  it s almost impossible to have appropriate empathy with 53 year old Doris who has to use our order-entry software   We simply cannot grasp the mental model of what she imagines is going on inside the computer  because we don t need to imagine  we know whats going on  or have a very good idea   Interaction Design should be done by non-programmers   Of course  this is never actually going to happen   Contradictorily I m quite glad about that  I like UI design even though deep down I know I m unsuited to it   For further info  read the book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum   Be warned  I found this book upsetting and insulting  it s a difficult read if you are a developer that cares about the user s experience

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Simplicity Vs Optimality  I believe its very difficult to write code that s both simple and optimal

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Unit Testing won t help you write good code  The only reason to have Unit tests is to make sure that code that already works doesn t break   Writing tests first  or writing code to the tests is ridiculous   If you write to the tests before the code  you won t even know what the edge cases are  You could have code that passes the tests but still fails in unforeseen circumstances   And furthermore  good developers will keep cohesion low  which will make the addition of new code unlikely to cause problems with existing stuff   In fact  I ll generalize that even further    Most  Best Practices  in Software Engineering are there to keep bad programmers from doing too much damage    They re there to hand-hold bad developers and keep them from making dumbass mistakes  Of course  since most developers are bad  this is a good thing  but good developers should get a pass

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One I have been tossing around for a while    The data is the system   Processes and software are built for data  not the other way around     Without data  the process software has little value   Data still has value without a process or software around it   Once we understand the data  what it does  how it interacts  the different forms it exists in at different stages  only then can a solution be built to support the system of data   Successful software systems processes seem to have an acute awareness  if not fanatical mindfulness of  where  the data is at in any given moment

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Don t use inheritance unless you can explain why you need it

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The world needs more GOTOs  GOTOs are avoided religiously often with no reasoning beyond  my professor told me GOTOs are bad    They have a purpose and would greatly simplify production code in many places   That said  they aren t really necessary in 99  of the code you ll ever write

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Using Stored Proc is easy to maintain and less deployment vs Using ORM is OO way thus it is good  I ve heard this lot in many of my projects  when ever this statements appear it is always tough get it settled

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I d rather be truly skilled experienced in an older technology that allows me to solve real world problems effectively   as opposed to new  fashionable  technologies that still going through the adolescent stage

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Inversion of control does not eliminate dependencies  but it sure does a great job of hiding them

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Source files are SO 20th century   Within the body of a function method  it makes sense to represent procedural logic as linear text  Even when the logic is not strictly linear  we have good programming constructs  loops  if statements  etc  that allow us to cleanly represent non-linear operations using linear text   But there is no reason that I should be required to divide my classes among distinct files or sort my functions methods fields properties etc in a particular order within those files  Why can t we just throw all those things within a big database file and let the IDE take care of sorting everything dynamically  If I want to sort my members by name then I ll click the member header on the members table  If I want to sort them by accessibility then I ll click the accessibility header  If I want to view my classes as an inheritence tree  then I ll click the button to do that   Perhaps classes and members could be viewed spatially  as if they were some sort of entities within a virtual world  If the programmer desired  the IDE could automatically position classes  amp  members that use each other near each other so that they re easy to find  Imaging being able to zoom in and out of this virtual world  Zoom all the way out and you can namespace galaxies with little class planets in them  Zoom in to a namespace and you can see class planets with method continents and islands and inner classes as orbitting moons  Zoom in to a method  and you see    the source code for that method   Basically  my point is that in modern languages it doesn t matter what file s  you put your classes in or in what order you define a class s members  so why are we still forced to use these archaic practices  Remember when Gmail came out and Google said  search  don t sort   Well  why can t the same philosophy be applied to programming languages

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Opinion  SQL is code   Treat it as such  That is  just like your C   Java  or other favorite object procedure language  develop a formatting style that is readable and maintainable     I hate when I see sloppy free-formatted SQL code   If you scream when you see both styles of curly braces on a page  why or why don t you scream when you see free formatted SQL or SQL that obscures or obfuscates the JOIN condition

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I think that using regions in C  is totally acceptable to collapse your code while in VS  Too many people try to say it hides your code and makes it hard to find things  But if you use them properly they can be very helpful to identify sections of code

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Rob Pike wrote   Data dominates  If you ve chosen the right data structures and organized things well  the algorithms will almost always be self-evident  Data structures  not algorithms  are central to programming     And since these days any serious data is in the millions of records  I content that good data modeling is the most important programming skill  whether using a rdbms or something like sqlite or amazon simpleDB or google appengine data storage      Fancy search and sorting algorithms aren t needed any more when the data  all the data  is stored in such a data storage system

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Software Development is a VERY small subset of Computer Science   People sometimes seem to think the two are synonymous  but in reality there are so many aspects to computer science that the average developer rarely  if ever  gets exposed to   Depending on one s career goals  I think there are a lot of CS graduates out there who would probably have been better off with some sort of Software Engineering education   I value education highly  have a BS in Computer science and am pursuing a MS in it part time  but I think that many people who obtain these degrees treat the degree as a means to an end and benefit very little   I know plenty of people who took the same Systems Software course I took  wrote the same assembler I wrote  and to this day see no value in what they did

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Not everything needs to be encapsulated into its own method  Some times it is ok to have a method do more then one thing

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I think that using regions in C  is totally acceptable to collapse your code while in VS  Too many people try to say it hides your code and makes it hard to find things  But if you use them properly they can be very helpful to identify sections of code

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My one   Long switch statements are your friends  Really  At least in C    People tend to avoid and discourage others to use long switch statements beause they are  unmanagable  and  have bad performance characteristics    Well  the thing is that in C   switch statements are always compiled automagically to hash jump tables so actually using them is the Best Thing To Do    in terms of performance if you need simple branching to multiple branches  Also  if the case statements are organized and grouped intelligently  for example in alphabetical order   they are not unmanageable at all

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Realizing sometimes good enough is good enough  is a major jump in your value as a programmer   Note that when I say  good enough   I mean  good enough   not it s some crap that happens to work   But then again  when you are under a time crunch   some crap that happens to work   may be considered  good enough

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I ve been burned for broadcasting these opinions in public before  but here goes   Well-written code in dynamically typed languages follows static-typing conventions  Having used Python  PHP  Perl  and a few other dynamically typed languages  I find that well-written code in these languages follows static typing conventions  for example    Its considered bad style to re-use a variable with different types  for example  its bad style to take a list variable and assign an int  then assign the variable a bool in the same method   Well-written code in dynamically typed languages doesn t mix types  A type-error in a statically typed language is still a type-error in a dynamically typed language  Functions are generally designed to operate on a single datatype at a time  so that a function which accepts a parameter of type T can only sensibly be used with objects of type T or subclasses of T  Functions designed to operator on many different datatypes are written in a way that constrains parameters to a well-defined interface  In general terms  if two objects of types A and B perform a similar function  but aren t subclasses of one another  then they almost certainly implement the same interface    While dynamically typed languages certainly provide more than one way to crack a nut  most well-written  idiomatic code in these languages pays close attention to types just as rigorously as code written in statically typed languages   Dynamic typing does not reduce the amount of code programmers need to write  When I point out how peculiar it is that so many static-typing conventions cross over into dynamic typing world  I usually add  so why use dynamically typed languages to begin with     The immediate response is something along the lines of being able to write more terse  expressive code  because dynamic typing allows programmers to omit type annotations and explicitly defined interfaces  However  I think the most popular statically typed languages  such as C   Java  and Delphi  are bulky by design  not as a result of their type systems   I like to use languages with a real type system like OCaml  which is not only statically typed  but its type inference and structural typing allow programmers to omit most type annotations and interface definitions   The existence of the ML family of languages demostrates that we can enjoy the benefits of static typing with all the brevity of writing in a dynamically typed language  I actually use OCaml s REPL for ad hoc  throwaway scripts in exactly the same way everyone else uses Perl or Python as a scripting language

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Assembly is the best first programming language

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Two brains think better than one  I firmly believe that pair programming is the number one factor when it comes to increasing code quality and programming productivity  Unfortunatly it is also a highly controversial for management who believes that  more hands    more code

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The simplest approach is the best approach  Programmers like to solve assumed or inferred requirements that add levels of complexity to a solution     I assume this block of code is going to be a performance bottleneck  therefore I will add all this extra code to mitigate this problem      I assume the user is going to want to do X  therefore I will add this really cool additional feature     If I make my code solve for this unneeded scenario it will be a good opportunity to use this new technology I ve been interested in trying out    In reality  the simplest solution that meets the requirements is best  This also gives you the most flexibility in taking your solution in a new direction if and when new requirements or problems come up

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Separation of concerns is evil     Only separate concerns if you have good reason for it  Otherwise  don t separate them   I have encountered too many occasions of separation only for the sake of separation  The second half of Dijkstra s statement  Minimal coupling  maximal cohesion  should not be forgotten      Happy to discuss this further

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Associative Arrays   Hash Maps   Hash Tables   whatever its called in your favourite language  are the best thing since sliced bread   Sure  they provide fast lookup from key to value  But they also make it easy to construct structured data on the fly  In scripting languages its often the only  or at least most used  way to represent structured data   IMHO they were a very important factor for the success of many scripting languages   And even in C   std  map and std  tr1  unordered map helped me writing code faster

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2 space indent   No discussion  It just has to be that way  -

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Okay  I said I d give a bit more detail on my  sealed classes  opinion  I guess one way to show the kind of answer I m interested in is to give one myself     Opinion  Classes should be sealed by default in C   Reasoning   There s no doubt that inheritance is powerful  However  it has to be somewhat guided  If someone derives from a base class in a way which is completely unexpected  this can break the assumptions in the base implementation  Consider two methods in the base class  where one calls another - if these methods are both virtual  then that implementation detail has to be documented  otherwise someone could quite reasonably override the second method and expect a call to the first one to work  And of course  as soon as the implementation is documented  it can t be changed    so you lose flexibility   C  took a step in the right direction  relative to Java  by making methods sealed by default  However  I believe a further step - making classes sealed by default - would have been even better  In particular  it s easy to override methods  or not explicitly seal existing virtual methods which you don t override  so that you end up with unexpected behaviour  This wouldn t actually stop you from doing anything you can currently do - it s just changing a default  not changing the available options  It would be a  safer  default though  just like the default access in C  is always  the most private visibility available at that point    By making people explicitly state that they wanted people to be able to derive from their classes  we d be encouraging them to think about it a bit more  It would also help me with my laziness problem - while I know I should be sealing almost all of my classes  I rarely actually remember to do so     Counter-argument   I can see an argument that says that a class which has no virtual methods can be derived from relatively safely without the extra inflexibility and documentation usually required   I m not sure how to counter this one at the moment  other than to say that I believe the harm of accidentally-unsealed classes is greater than that of accidentally-sealed ones

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Haven t tested it yet for controversy  but there may be potential   The best line of code is the one you never wrote

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Design patterns are hurting good design more than they re helping it   IMO software design  especially good software design is far too varied to be meaningfully captured in patterns  especially in the small number of patterns people can actually remember - and they re far too abstract for people to really remember more than a handful  So they re not helping much   And on the other hand  far too many people become enamoured with the concept and try to apply patterns everywhere - usually  in the resulting code you can t find the actual design between all the  completely meaningless  Singletons and Abstract Factories

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I think Java should have supported system-specific features via thin native library wrappers   Phrased another way  I think Sun s determination to require that Java only support portable features was a big mistake from almost everyone s perspective   A zillion years later  SWT came along and solved the basic problem of writing a portable native-widget UI  but by then Microsoft was forced to fork Java into C  and lots of C   had been written that could otherwise have been done in civilized Java  Now the world runs on a blend of C   VB  Java  C    Ruby  Python and Perl   All the Java programs still look and act wierd except for the SWT ones   If Java had come out with thin wrappers around native libraries  people could have written the SWT-equivalent entirely in Java  and we could have  as things evolved  made portable apparently-native apps in Java  I m totally for portable applications  but it would have been better if that portability were achieved in an open market of middleware UI  and other feature  libraries  and not through simply reducing the user s menu to junk or faking the UI with Swing   I suppose Sun thought that ISV s would suffer with Java s limitations and then all the world s new PC apps would magically run on Suns  Nice try  They ended up not getting the apps AND not having the language take off until we could use it for logic-only server back-end code   If things had been done differently maybe the local application wouldn t be  well  dead

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If you have ever let anyone from rentacoder com touch your project  both it and your business are completely devoid of worth

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Greater-than operators         should be deprecated  I tried coding with a preference for less-than over greater-than for awhile and it stuck  I don t want to go back  and indeed I feel that everyone should do it my way in this case   Consider common mathematical  range  notation   0  lt   i  lt  10  That s easy to approximate in code now and you get used to seeing the idiom where the variable is repeated in the middle joined by  amp  amp    if  0  lt   i  amp  amp  i  lt  10      return true  else     return false    Once you get used to that pattern  you ll never look at silliness like   if      i  lt  0    i  gt   9       return true    the same way again   Long sequences of relations become a bit easier to work with because the operands tend towards nondecreasing order   Furthermore  a preference for operator lt  is enshrined in the C   standards  In some cases operator  is defined in terms of it   as   a lt b    b lt a

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To be really controversial   You know nothing   or in other words   I know that I know nothing    this could be paraphrased in many kinds but I think you get it    When starting with computers developing  IMHO there are three stages everyone has to walk through   The newbie  knows nothing  this is fact   The intermediate  thinks he knows something very much  all   this is conceit   The professional  knows that he knows nothing  because as a programmer most time you have to work on things you have never done before   This is no bad thing  I love to familiarize myself to new things all the time   I think as a programmer you have to know how to learn - or better  To learn to learn  because remember  You know nothing

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This one is not exactly on programming  because html css are not programming languages   Tables are ok for layout  css and divs can t do everything  save yourself the hassle and use a simple table  then use css on top of it

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Microsoft Windows is the best platform for software development   Reasoning  Microsoft spoils its developers with excellent and cheap development tools  the platform and its API s are well documented  the platform is evolving at a rappid rate which creates a lot of opportunities for developers  The OS has a large user base which is important for obvious commercial reasons  there is a big community of Windows developers  I haven t yet been fired for choosing Microsoft

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Most of programming job interview questions are pointless  Especially those figured out by programmers   It is a common case  at least according to my  amp  my friends experience  where a puffed up  programmer  asks you some tricky wtf he spent weeks googling for  The funny thing about that is  you get home and google it within a minute  It s like they often try to beat you up with their sophisticated weapons  instead of checking if you d be a comprehensive  pragmatic team player to work with    Similar stupidity IMO is when you re being asked for highly accessible fundamentals  like   Oh wait  let me see if you can pseudo-code that insert name here-algorithm on a sheet of paper  sic     Do I really need to remember it while applying for a high-level programming job  Should I efficiently solve problems or puzzles

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C   is one of the WORST programming languages - EVER   It has all of the hallmarks of something designed by committee - it does not do any given job well  and does some jobs  like OO  terribly  It has a  kitchen sink  desperation to it that just won t go away   It is a horrible  first language  to learn to program with  You get no elegance  no assistance  from the language   Instead you have bear traps and mine fields  memory management  templates  etc     It is not a good language to try to learn OO concepts  It behaves as  C with a class wrapper  instead of a proper OO language   I could go on  but will leave it at that for now  I have never liked programming in C    and although I  cut my teeth  on FORTRAN  I totally loved programming in C  I still think C was one of the great  classic  languages  Something that C   is certainly NOT  in my opinion   Cheers   -R  EDIT  To respond to the comments on teaching C    You can teach C   in two ways - either teaching it as C  on steroids   start with variables  conditions  loops  etc   or teaching it as a pure  OO  language  start with classes  methods  etc   You can find teaching texts that use one or other of these approaches  I prefer the latter approach  OO first  as it does emphasize the capabilities of C   as an OO language  which was the original design emphasis of C     If you want to teach C    as C   then I think you should teach C  not C     But the problem with C   as a first language in my experience is that the language is simply too BIG to teach in one semester  plus most  intro  texts try and cover everything  It is simply not possible to cover all the topics in a  first language  course  You have to at least split it into 2 semesters  and then it s no longer  first language   IMO   I do teach C    but only as a  new language  - that is  you must be proficient in some prior  pure  language  not scripting or macros  before you can enroll in the course  C   is a very fine  second language  to learn  IMO   -R   Nother Edit   to Konrad   I do not at all agree that C    is superior in every way  to C  I spent years coding C programs for microcontrollers and other embedded applications  The C compilers for these devices are highly optimized  often producing code as good as hand-coded assembler  When you move to C    you gain a tremendous overhead imposed by the compiler in order to manage language features you may not use  In embedded applications  you gain little by adding classes and such  IMO  What you need is tight  clean code  You can write it in C    but then you re really just writing C  and the C compilers are more optimized in these applications   I wrote a MIDI engine  first in C  later in C    at the vendor s request  for an embedded controller  sound card   In the end  to meet the performance requirements  MIDI timings  etc  we had to revert to pure C for all of the core code  We were able to use C   for the high-level code  and having classes was very sweet - but we needed C to get the performance at the lower level  The C code was an order of magnitude faster than the C   code  but hand coded assembler was only slightly faster than the compiled C code  This was back in the early 1990s  just to place the events properly   -R

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If your text editor doesn t do good code completion  you re wasting everyone s time   Quickly remembering thousands of argument lists  spellings  and return values  not to mention class structures and similarly complex organizational patterns  is a task computers are good at and people  comparatively  are not  I buy wholeheartedly that slowing yourself down a bit and avoiding the gadget feature cult is a great way to increase efficiency and avoid bugs  but there is simply no benefit to spending 30 seconds hunting unnecessarily through sourcecode or docs when you could spend nil    especially if you just need a spelling  which is more often than we like to admit    Granted  if there isn t an editor that provides this functionality for your language  or the task is simple enough to knock out in the time it would take to load a heavier editor  nobody is going to tell you that Eclipse and 90 plugins is the right tool  But please don t tell me that the ability to H-J-K-L your way around like it s 1999 really saves you more time than hitting escape every time you need a method signature    even if you do feel less  hacker  doing it   Thoughts

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Okay  I said I d give a bit more detail on my  sealed classes  opinion  I guess one way to show the kind of answer I m interested in is to give one myself     Opinion  Classes should be sealed by default in C   Reasoning   There s no doubt that inheritance is powerful  However  it has to be somewhat guided  If someone derives from a base class in a way which is completely unexpected  this can break the assumptions in the base implementation  Consider two methods in the base class  where one calls another - if these methods are both virtual  then that implementation detail has to be documented  otherwise someone could quite reasonably override the second method and expect a call to the first one to work  And of course  as soon as the implementation is documented  it can t be changed    so you lose flexibility   C  took a step in the right direction  relative to Java  by making methods sealed by default  However  I believe a further step - making classes sealed by default - would have been even better  In particular  it s easy to override methods  or not explicitly seal existing virtual methods which you don t override  so that you end up with unexpected behaviour  This wouldn t actually stop you from doing anything you can currently do - it s just changing a default  not changing the available options  It would be a  safer  default though  just like the default access in C  is always  the most private visibility available at that point    By making people explicitly state that they wanted people to be able to derive from their classes  we d be encouraging them to think about it a bit more  It would also help me with my laziness problem - while I know I should be sealing almost all of my classes  I rarely actually remember to do so     Counter-argument   I can see an argument that says that a class which has no virtual methods can be derived from relatively safely without the extra inflexibility and documentation usually required   I m not sure how to counter this one at the moment  other than to say that I believe the harm of accidentally-unsealed classes is greater than that of accidentally-sealed ones

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A Developer should never test their own software  Development and testing are two diametrically opposed disciplines  Development is all about construction  and testing is all about demolition  Effective testing requires a specific mindset and approach where you are trying to uncover developer mistakes  find holes in their assumptions  and flaws in their logic  Most people  myself included  are simply unable to place themselves and their own code under such scrutiny and still remain objective

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Software is not an engineering discipline   We never should have let the computers escape from the math department

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A Developer should never test their own software  Development and testing are two diametrically opposed disciplines  Development is all about construction  and testing is all about demolition  Effective testing requires a specific mindset and approach where you are trying to uncover developer mistakes  find holes in their assumptions  and flaws in their logic  Most people  myself included  are simply unable to place themselves and their own code under such scrutiny and still remain objective

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Inversion of control does not eliminate dependencies  but it sure does a great job of hiding them

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Recursion is fun  Yes  I know it can be an ineffectual use of stack space  and all that jazz   But some times a recursive algorithm is just so nice and clean compared to it s iterative counterpart   I always get a bit gleeful when I can sneak a recursive function in somewhere

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A majority of the  user-friendly  Fourth Generation Languages  SQL included  are worthless overrated pieces of rubbish that should have never made it to common use   4GLs in general have a wordy and ambiguous syntax  Though 4GLs are supposed to allow  non technical people  to write programs  you still need the  technical  people to write and maintain them anyway   4GL programs in general are harder to write  harder to read and harder to optimize than   4GLs should be avoided as far as possible

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You must know how to type to be a programmer   It s controversial among people who don t know how to type  but who insist that they can two-finger hunt-and-peck as fast as any typist  or that they don t really need to spend that much time typing  or that Intellisense relieves the need to type     I ve never met anyone who does know how to type  but insists that it doesn t make a difference   See also   Programming s Dirtiest Little Secret

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Code as Design  Three Essays by Jack W  Reeves  The source code of any software is its most accurate design document  Everything else  specs  docs  and sometimes comments  is either incorrect  outdated or misleading   Guaranteed to get you fired pretty much everywhere

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UML diagrams are highly overrated  Of course there are useful diagrams e g  class diagram for the Composite Pattern  but many UML diagrams have absolutely no value

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All variables properties should be readonly final by default   The reasoning is a bit analogous to the sealed argument for classes  put forward by Jon  One entity in a program should have one job  and one job only  In particular  it makes absolutely no sense for most variables and properties to ever change value  There are basically two exceptions    Loop variables  But then  I argue that the variable actually doesn t change value at all  Rather  it goes out of scope at the end of the loop and is re-instantiated in the next turn  Therefore  immutability would work nicely with loop variables and everyone who tries to change a loop variable s value by hand should go straight to hell  Accumulators  For example  imagine the case of summing over the values in an array  or even a list string that accumulates some information about something else   Today  there are better means to accomplish the same goal  Functional languages have higher-order functions  Python has list comprehension and  NET has LINQ  In all these cases  there is no need for a mutable accumulator   result holder   Consider the special case of string concatenation  In many environments   NET  Java   strings are actually immutables  Why then allow an assignment to a string variable at all  Much better to use a builder class  i e  a StringBuilder  all along    I realize that most languages today just aren t built to acquiesce in my wish  In my opinion  all these languages are fundamentally flawed for this reason  They would lose nothing of their expressiveness  power  and ease of use if they would be changed to treat all variables as read-only by default and didn t allow any assignment to them after their initialization

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Code as Design  Three Essays by Jack W  Reeves  The source code of any software is its most accurate design document  Everything else  specs  docs  and sometimes comments  is either incorrect  outdated or misleading   Guaranteed to get you fired pretty much everywhere

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Opinion  explicit variable declaration is a great thing     I ll never understand the  wisdom  of letting the developer waste costly time tracking down runtime errors caused by variable name typos instead of simply letting the compiler interpreter catch them   Nobody s ever given me an explanation better than  well it saves time since I don t have to write  int i      Uhhhhh    yeah  sure  but how much time does it take to track down a runtime error

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There is no  one size fits all  approach to development  I m surprised that this is a controversial opinion  because it seems to me like common sense  However  there are many entries on popular blogs promoting the  one size fits all  approach to development so I think I may actually be in the minority   Things I ve seen being touted as the correct approach for any project - before any information is known about it - are things like the use of Test Driven Development  TDD   Domain Driven Design  DDD   Object-Relational Mapping  ORM   Agile  capital A   Object Orientation  OO   etc  etc  encompassing everything from methodologies to architectures to components  All with nice marketable acronyms  of course   People even seem to go as far as putting badges on their blogs such as  I m Test Driven  or similar  as if their strict adherence to a single approach whatever the details of the project project is actually a good thing    It isn t    Choosing the correct methodologies and architectures and components  etc   is something that should be done on a per-project basis  and depends not only on the type of project you re working on and its unique requirements  but also the size and ability of the team you re working with

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Your job is to put yourself out of work   When you re writing software for your employer  any software that you create is to be written in such a way that it can be picked up by any developer and understood with a minimal amount of effort  It is well designed  clearly and consistently written  formatted cleanly  documented where it needs to be  builds daily as expected  checked into the repository  and appropriately versioned    If you get hit by a bus  laid off  fired  or walk off the job  your employer should be able to replace you on a moment s notice  and the next guy could step into your role  pick up your code and be up and running within a week tops  If he or she can t do that  then you ve failed miserably   Interestingly  I ve found that having that goal has made me more valuable to my employers  The more I strive to be disposable  the more valuable I become to them

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Relational Databases are a waste of time  Use object databases instead   Relational database vendors try to fool us into believing that the only scaleable  persistent and safe storage in the world is relational databases  I am a certified DBA  Have you ever spent hours trying to optimize a query and had no idea what was going wrong  Relational databases don t let you make your own  search paths when you need them  You give away much of the control over the speed of your app into the hands of people you ve never met and they are not as smart as you think    Sure  sometimes in a well-maintained database they come up with a quick answer for a complex query  But the price you pay for this is too high  You have to choose between writing raw SQL every time you want to read an entry of your data  which is dangerous  Or use an Object relational mapper which adds more complexity and things outside your control    More importantly  you are actively forbidden from coming up with smart search algorithms  because every damn roundtrip to the database costs you around 11ms  It is too much  Imagine you know this super-graph algorithm which will answer a specific question  which might not even be expressible in SQL   in due time  But even if your algorithm is linear  and interesting algorithms are not linear  forget about combining it with a relational database as enumerating a large table will take you hours   Compare that with SandstoneDb  or Gemstone for Smalltalk  If you are into Java  give db4o a shot    So  my advice is  Use an object-DB  Sure  they aren t perfect and some queries will be slower  But you will be surprised how many will be faster  Because loading the objects will not require all these strange transofmations between SQL and your domain data  And if you really need speed for a certain query  object databases have the query optimizer you should trust  your brain

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Not all programmers are created equal  Quite often managers think that DeveloperA    DeveloperB simply because they have same level of experience and so on  In actual fact  the performance of one developer can be 10x or even 100x that of another   It s politically risky to talk about it  but sometimes I feel like pointing out that  even though several team members may appear to be of equal skill  it s not always the case  I have even seen cases where lead developers were  beyond hope  and junior devs did all the actual work - I made sure they got the credit  though

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I think we should move away from  C   Its too old   But  the old dog is still barking louder

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I also think there s nothing wrong with having binaries in source control   if there is a good reason for it   If I have an assembly I don t have the source for  and might not necessarily be in the same place on each devs machine  then I will usually stick it in a  binaries  directory and reference it in a project using a relative path     Quite a lot of people seem to think I should be burned at the stake for even mentioning  source control  and  binary  in the same sentence   I even know of places that have strict rules saying you can t add them

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Programming is so easy a five year old can do it   Programming in and of itself is not hard  it s common sense  You are just telling a computer what to do    You re not a genius  please get over yourself

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A good developer needs to know more than just how to code

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Regurgitating well known sayings by programming greats out of context with the zeal of a fanatic and the misplaced assumption that they are ironclad rules really gets my goat   For example  premature optimization is the root of all evil  as covered by this thread   IMO  many technical problems and solutions are very context sensitive and the notion of global best practices is a fallacy

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Two brains think better than one  I firmly believe that pair programming is the number one factor when it comes to increasing code quality and programming productivity  Unfortunatly it is also a highly controversial for management who believes that  more hands    more code

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Code Generation is bad  I hate languages that require you to make use of code generation  or copy amp paste  for simple things  like JavaBeans with all their Getters and Setters   C  s AutoProperties are a step in the right direction  but for nice DTOs with Fields  Properties and Constructor parameters you still need a lot of redundancy

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Separation of concerns is evil     Only separate concerns if you have good reason for it  Otherwise  don t separate them   I have encountered too many occasions of separation only for the sake of separation  The second half of Dijkstra s statement  Minimal coupling  maximal cohesion  should not be forgotten      Happy to discuss this further

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Opinion  That frameworks and third part components should be only used as a last resort   I often see programmers immediately pick a framework to accomplish a task without learning the underlying approach it takes to work   Something will inevitably break  or we ll find a limition we didn t account for and we ll be immediately stuck and have to rethink major part of a system   Frameworks are fine to use as long it is carefully thought out

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Social skills matter more than technical skills  Agreable but average programmers with good social skills will have a more successful carreer than outstanding programmers who are disagreable people

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Relational database systems will be the best thing since sliced bread         when we  hopefully  get them  that is   SQL databases suck so hard it s not funny   What I find amusing  if sad  is certified DBAs who think an SQL database system is a relational one   Speaks volumes for the quality of said certification   Confused   Read C  J  Date s books   edit  Why is it called Relational and what does that word mean   These days  a programmer  or a certified DBA  wink  with a strong  heck  any  mathematical background is an exception rather than the common case  I m an instance of the common case as well    SQL with its tables  columns and rows  as well as the joke called Entity Relationship Modelling just add insult to the injury   No wonder the misconception that Relational Database Systems are called that because of some Relationships  Foreign Keys   between Entities  tables  is so pervasive   In fact  Relational derives from the mathematical concept of relations  and as such is intimately related to set theory and functions  in the mathematical  not any programming  sense     http   en wikipedia org wiki Finitary relation  2       In mathematics  more specifically  in set theory and logic   a relation is a property that assigns truth values to combinations  k-tuples  of k individuals  Typically  the property describes a possible connection between the components of a k-tuple  For a given set of k-tuples  a truth value is assigned to each k-tuple according to whether the property does or does not hold       An example of a ternary relation  i e   between three individuals  is   X was-introduced-to Y by Z   where  X Y Z  is a 3-tuple of persons  for example   Beatrice Wood was introduced to Henri-Pierre Roch   by Marcel Duchamp  is true  while  Karl Marx was introduced to Friedrich Engels by Queen Victoria  is false    Wikipedia makes it perfectly clear  in a SQL DBMS  such a ternary relation would be a  table   not a  foreign key   I m taking the liberty to rename the  columns  of the relation  X   who  Y   to  Z   by    CREATE TABLE introduction     who INDIVIDUAL NOT NULL   to INDIVIDUAL NOT NULL   by INDIVIDUAL NOT NULL   PRIMARY KEY  who  to  by       Also  it would contain  among others  possibly   this  row    INSERT INTO introduction     who   to   by   VALUES      Beatrice Wood     Henri-Pierre Roch       Marcel Duchamp       but not this one   INSERT INTO introduction     who   to   by   VALUES      Karl Marx     Friedrich Engels     Queen Victoria       Relational Database Dictionary      relation  mathematics  Given sets s1  s2       sn  not necessarily distinct  r is a relation on those sets if and only if it s a set of n-tuples each of which has its first element from s1  its second element from s2  and so on    Equivalently  r is a subset of the Cartesian product s1 x s2 x     x sn        Set si is the ith domain of r  i   1       n    Note  There are several important logical differences between relations in mathematics and their relational model counterparts   Here are some of them          Mathematical relations have a left-to-right ordering to their attributes    Actually  mathematical relations have  at best  only a very rudimentary concept of attributes anyway   Certainly their attributes aren t named  other than by their ordinal position    As a consequence  mathematical relations don t really have either a heading or a type in the relational model sense    Mathematical relations are usually either binary or  just occasionally  unary   By contrast  relations in the relational model are of degree n  where n can be any nonnegative integer    Relational operators such as JOIN  EXTEND  and the rest were first defined in the context of the relational model specifically  the mathematical theory of relations includes few such operators          And so on  the foregoing isn t meant to be an exhaustive list

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If a developer cannot write clear  concise and grammatically correct comments then they should have to go back and take English 101     We have developers and  the horror  architects who cannot write coherently   When their documents are reviewed they say things like  oh  don t worry about grammatical errors or spelling - that s not important    Then they wonder why their convoluted garbage documents become convoluted buggy code   I tell the interns that I mentor that if you can t communicate your great ideas verbally or in writing you may as well not have them

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There is no such thing as Object-Oriented programming

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QA should know the code  indirectly  better than development  QA gets paid to find things development didn t intend to happen  and they often do      Btw  I m a developer who just values good QA guys a whole bunch -- far to few of them    far to few

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Remove classes  Number of classes  methods of classes  in  NET Framework handles exception implicitly  It s difficult to work with a dumb person

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2 space indent   No discussion  It just has to be that way  -

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Opinion  Never ever have different code between  debug  and  release  builds  The main reason being that release code almost never gets tested  Better to have the same code running in test as it is in the wild

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That WordPress IS a CMS  technically  therefore indeed    https   stackoverflow com questions 105648 wordpress-is-it-a-cms

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SQL could and should have been done better   Because its original spec was limited  various venders have been extending the language in different directions for years   SQL that is written for MS-SQL is different than SQL for Oracle  IBM  MySQL  Sybase  etc   Other serious languages  take C   for example  were carefully standardized so that C   written under one compiler will generally compile unmodified under another   Why couldn t SQL have been designed and standardized better   HTML was a seriously broken choice as a browser display language   We ve spent years extending it through CSS  XHTML  Javascript  Ajax  Flash  etc  in order to make a useable UI  and the result is still not as good as your basic thick-client windows app   Plus  a competent web programmer now needs to know three or four languages in order to make a decent UI   Oh yeah   Hungarian notation is an abomination

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I also think there s nothing wrong with having binaries in source control   if there is a good reason for it   If I have an assembly I don t have the source for  and might not necessarily be in the same place on each devs machine  then I will usually stick it in a  binaries  directory and reference it in a project using a relative path     Quite a lot of people seem to think I should be burned at the stake for even mentioning  source control  and  binary  in the same sentence   I even know of places that have strict rules saying you can t add them

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Developers overuse databases   All too often  developers store data in a DBMS that should be in code or in file s    I ve seen a one-column-one-row table that stored the  system password   separate from the user table    I ve seen constants stored in databases   I ve seen databases that would make a grown coder cry   There is some sort of mystical awe that the offending coders have of the DBMS--the database can do anything  but they don t know how it works   DBAs practice a black art   It also allows responsibility transference   The database is too slow     The database did it   and other excuses are common   Left unchecked  these coders go on develop databases-within-databases  systems-within-systems    There is a name to this anti-pattern  but I forget what it is

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I really dislike when people tell me to use getters and setters instead of making the variable public when you should be able to both get and set the class variable    I totally agree on it if it s to change a variable in an object in your object  so you don t get things like  a b c d e   something  but I would rather use  a x   something  then a setX something   I think a x   something  actually are both easier to read  and prettier then set get in the same example   I don t see the reason by making   void setX T x        this- x   x     T getX         return x     which is more code  more time when you do it over and over again  and just makes the code harder to read

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Don t write code  remove code   As a smart teacher once told me   Don t write code  Writing code is bad  Removing code is good  and if you have to write code - write small code

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Globals and or Singletons are not inherently evil  I come from more of a sysadmin  shell  Perl  and my  real  programming   PHP type background  last year I was thrown into a Java development gig   Singletons are evil  Globals are so evil they are not even allowed  Yet  Java has things like AOP  and now various  Dependency Injection  frameworks  we used Google Guice   AOP less so  but DI things for sure give you what  Globals  Uhh  thanks

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Arrays should by default be 1-based rather than 0-based   This is not necessarily the case with system implementation languages  but languages like Java swallowed more C oddities than they should have    Element 1  should be the first element  not the second  to avoid confusion   Computer science is not software development   You wouldn t hire an engineer who studied only physics  after all   Learn as much mathematics as is feasible   You won t use most of it  but you need to be able to think that way to be good at software   The single best programming language yet standardized is Common Lisp  even if it is verbose and has zero-based arrays   That comes largely from being designed as a way to write computations  rather than as an abstraction of a von Neumann machine   At least 90  of all comparative criticism of programming languages can be reduced to  Language A has feature C  and I don t know how to do C or something equivalent in Language B  so Language A is better     Best practices  is the most impressive way to spell  mediocrity  I ve ever seen

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Developers are all different  and should be treated as such   Developers don t fit into a box  and shouldn t be treated as such  The best language or tool for solving a problem has just as much to do with the developers as it does with the details of the problem being solved

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Realizing sometimes good enough is good enough  is a major jump in your value as a programmer   Note that when I say  good enough   I mean  good enough   not it s some crap that happens to work   But then again  when you are under a time crunch   some crap that happens to work   may be considered  good enough

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Extension Methods are the work of the Devil  Everyone seems to think that extension methods in  Net are the best thing since sliced bread  The number of developers singing their praises seems to rise by the minute but I m afraid I can t help but despise them and unless someone can come up with a brilliant justification or example that I haven t already heard then I will never write one  I recently came across this thread and I must say reading the examples of the highest voted extensions made me feel a little like vomiting  metaphorically of course    The main reasons given for their extensiony goodness are increased readability  improved OO-ness and the ability to chain method calls better   I m afraid I have to differ  I find in fact that they  unequivocally  reduce readability and OO-ness by virtue of the fact that they are at their core a lie  If you need a utility method that acts upon an object then write a utility method that acts on that object don t lie to me  When I see aString SortMeBackwardsUsingKlingonSortOrder then string should have that method because that is telling me something about the string object not something about the AnnoyingNerdReferences StringUtilities class   LINQ was designed in such a way that chained method calls are necessary to avoid strange and uncomfortable expressions and the extension methods that arise from LINQ are understandable but in general chained method calls reduce readability and lead to code of the sort we see in obfuscated Perl contests   So  in short  extension methods are evil  Cast off the chains of Satan and commit yourself to extension free code

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Exceptions considered harmful

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Debuggers are a crutch   It s so controversial that even I don t believe it as much as I used to   Con  I spend more time getting up to speed on other people s voluminous code  so anything that help with  how did I get here  and  what is happening  either pre-mortem or post-mortem can be helpful   Pro  However  I happily stand by the idea that if you don t understand the answers to those questions for code that you developed yourself or that you ve become familiar with  spending all your time in a debugger is not the solution  it s part of the problem   Before hitting  Post Your Answer  I did a quick Google check for this exact phrase  it turns out that I m not the only one who has held this opinion or used this phrase   I turned up a long discussion of this very question on the Fog Creek software forum  which cited various luminaries including Linus Torvalds as notable proponents

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You ll never use enough languages  simply because every language is the best fit for only a tiny class of problems  and it s far too difficult to mix languages   Pet examples  Java should be used only when the spec is very well thought out  because of lots of interdependencies meaning refactoring hell  and when working with concrete concepts  Perl should only be used for text processing  C should only be used when speed trumps everything  including flexibility and security  Key-value pairs should be used for one-dimensional data  CSV for two-dimensional data  XML for hierarchical data  and a DB for anything more complex

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Design patterns are hurting good design more than they re helping it   IMO software design  especially good software design is far too varied to be meaningfully captured in patterns  especially in the small number of patterns people can actually remember - and they re far too abstract for people to really remember more than a handful  So they re not helping much   And on the other hand  far too many people become enamoured with the concept and try to apply patterns everywhere - usually  in the resulting code you can t find the actual design between all the  completely meaningless  Singletons and Abstract Factories

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The world needs more GOTOs  GOTOs are avoided religiously often with no reasoning beyond  my professor told me GOTOs are bad    They have a purpose and would greatly simplify production code in many places   That said  they aren t really necessary in 99  of the code you ll ever write

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I really dislike when people tell me to use getters and setters instead of making the variable public when you should be able to both get and set the class variable    I totally agree on it if it s to change a variable in an object in your object  so you don t get things like  a b c d e   something  but I would rather use  a x   something  then a setX something   I think a x   something  actually are both easier to read  and prettier then set get in the same example   I don t see the reason by making   void setX T x        this- x   x     T getX         return x     which is more code  more time when you do it over and over again  and just makes the code harder to read

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Software is like toilet paper  The less you spend on it  the bigger of a pain in the ass it is   That is to say  outsourcing is rarely a good idea   I ve always figured this to be true  but I never really knew the extent of it until recently  I have been  maintaining   read   fixing   some off-shored code recently  and it is a huge mess  It is easily costing our company more than the difference had it been developed in-house   People outside your business will inherently know less about your business model  and therefore will not do as good a job programming any system that works within your business  Also  they know they won t have to support it  so there s no incentive to do anything other than half-ass it

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Having a process that involves code being approved before it is merged onto the main line is a terrible idea   It breeds insecurity and laziness in developers  who  if they knew they could be screwing up dozens of people would be very careful about the changes they make  get lulled into a sense of not having to think about all the possible clients of the code they may be affecting   The person going over the code is less likely to have thought about it as much as the person writing it  so it can actually lead to poorer quality code being checked in    though  yes  it will probably follow all the style guidelines and be well commented

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Premature optimization is NOT the root of all evil  Lack of proper planning is the root of all evil      Remember the old naval saw      Proper Planning Prevents P ss Poor   Performance

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When Creating Unit tests for a Data Access Layer  data should be retrieved directly from the DB  not from mock objects    Consider the following   void IList lt Customer gt  GetCustomers       List lt Customer gt  res   new List lt Customer gt        DbCommand cmd      initialize command   IDataReader r   cmd ExecuteQuery       while r read             Customer c   ReadFiledsIntoCustomer r        res Add c          return res      In a unit test for GetCustomers  should the call to cmd ExecuteQuery   actually access the DB or should it s behavior be mocked   I reckon that you shouldn t mock the actual call to the DB if the following holds true    A test server and the schema exist  The schema is stable  meaning you are not expecting major changes to it  The DAL has not smart logic  queries are constructed trivially  config stored procs  and the desirialization logic is simple    From my experience the great benefit of this approach is that you get to interact with the DB early  experiancing the  feel   not just the  look   It saves you lots of headaches afterwards and is the best way to familiarize oneself with the schema   Many might argue that as soon as the execution flow crosses the process boundaries- it seizes to be a unit test  I agree it has its drawbacks  especially when the DB is unavailable and then you cannot run UT   However  I believe that this should be a valid thing to do in many cases

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Design Patterns are a symptom of Stone Age programming language design  They have their purpose  A lot of good software gets built with them  But the fact that there was a need to codify these  recipes  for psychological abstractions about how your code works should work speaks to a lack of programming languages expressive enough to handle this abstraction for us    The remedy  I think  lies in languages that allow you to embed more and more of the design into the code  by defining language constructs that might not exist or might not have general applicability but really really make sense in situations your code deals with incessantly  The Scheme people have known this for years  and there are things possible with Scheme macros that would make most monkeys-for-hire piss their pants

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If I were being controversial  I d have to suggest that Jon Skeet isn t omnipotent

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That the Law of Demeter  considered in context of aggregation and composition  is an anti-pattern

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Less code is better than more   If the users say  that s it    and your work remains invisible  it s done right   Glory can be found elsewhere

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The code is the design

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It takes less time to produce well-documented code than poorly-documented code  When I say well-documented I mean with comments that communicate your intention clearly at every step  Yes  typing comments takes some time  And yes  your coworkers should all be smart enough to figure out what you intended just by reading your descriptive function and variable names and spelunking their way through all your executable statements  But it takes more of their time to do it than if you had just explained your intentions  and clear documentation is especially helpful when the logic of the code turns out to be wrong  Not that your code would ever be wrong     I firmly believe that if you time it from when you start a project to when you ship a defect-free product  writing well-documented code takes less time  For one thing  having to explain clearly what you re doing forces you to think it through clearly  and if you can t write a clear  concise explanation of what your code is accomplishing then it s probably not designed well  And for another purely selfish reason  well-documented and well-structured code is far easier to dump onto someone else to maintain - thus freeing the original author to go create the next big thing  I rarely if ever have to stop what I m doing to explain how my code was meant to work because it s blatantly obvious to anyone who can read English  even if they can t read C C   C  etc    And one more reason is  frankly  my memory just isn t that good  I can t recall what I had for breakfast yesterday  much less what I was thinking when I wrote code a month or a year ago  Perhaps your memory is far better than mine  but because I document my intentions I can quickly pick up wherever I left off and make changes without having to first figure out what I was thinking when I wrote it   That s why I document well - not because I feel some noble calling to produce pretty code fit for display  and not because I m a purist  but simply because end-to-end it lets me ship quality software in less time

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Exceptions considered harmful

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coding is not typing  It takes time to write the code  Most of the time in the editor window  you are just looking at the code  not actually typing  Not as often  but quite frequently  you are deleting what you have written  Or moving from one place to another  Or renaming    If you are banging away at the keyboard for a long time you are doing something wrong    Corollary  Number of lines of code written per day is not a linear measurement of a programmers productivity  as programmer that writes 100 lines in a day is quite likely a better programmer then the one that writes 20  but one that writes 5000 is certainly a bad programmer

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How about this one   Garbage collectors actually hurt programmers  productivity and make resource leaks harder to find and fix  Note that I am talking about resouces in general  and not only memory

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Development teams should be segregated more often by technological architectural layers instead of business function   I come from a general culture where developers own  everything from web page to stored procedure   So in order to implement a feature in the system application  they would prepare the database table schemas  write the stored procs  match the data access code  implement the business logic and web service methods  and the web page interfaces   And guess what  Everybody has their own way to doing things  Everyone struggles to learn the ASP NET AJAX and Telerik or Infragistic suites  Enterprise Library or other productivity and data layer and persistence frameworks  Aspect-oriented frameworks  logging and caching application blocks  DB2 or Oracle percularities  And guess what  Everybody takes heck of a long time to learn how to do things the proper way  Meaning  lots of mistakes in the meantime and plenty of resulting defects and performance bottlenecks  And heck of a longer time to fix them  Across each and every layer  Everybody has a hand in every Visual Studio project  Nobody is specialised to handle and optmise one problem technology domain  Too many chefs spoil the soup  All the chefs result in some radioactive goo   Developers may have cross-layer domain responsibilities  but they should not pretend that they can be masters of all disciplines  and should be limited to only a few  In my experience  when a project is not a small one and utilises lots of technologies  covering more business functions in a single layer is more productive  as well as encouraging more test code test that layer  than covering less business functions spanning the entire architectural stack  which motivates developers to test only via their UI and not test code

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Most comments in code are in fact a pernicious form of code duplication   We spend most of our time maintaining code written by others  or ourselves  and poor  incorrect  outdated  misleading comments must be near the top of the list of most annoying artifacts in code   I think eventually many people just blank them out  especially those flowerbox monstrosities   Much better to concentrate on making the code readable  refactoring as necessary  and minimising idioms and quirkiness   On the other hand  many courses teach that comments are very nearly more important than the code itself  leading to the this next line adds one to invoiceTotal style of commenting

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Opinion  Never ever have different code between  debug  and  release  builds  The main reason being that release code almost never gets tested  Better to have the same code running in test as it is in the wild

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Recursion is fun  Yes  I know it can be an ineffectual use of stack space  and all that jazz   But some times a recursive algorithm is just so nice and clean compared to it s iterative counterpart   I always get a bit gleeful when I can sneak a recursive function in somewhere

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Every developer should be familiar with the basic architecture of modern computers  This also applies to developers who target a virtual machine  maybe even more so  because they have been told time and time again that they don t need to worry themselves with memory management etc

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Readability is the most important aspect of your code   Even more so than correctness   If it s readable  it s easy to fix   It s also easy to optimize  easy to change  easy to understand   And hopefully other developers can learn something from it too

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Debuggers are a crutch   It s so controversial that even I don t believe it as much as I used to   Con  I spend more time getting up to speed on other people s voluminous code  so anything that help with  how did I get here  and  what is happening  either pre-mortem or post-mortem can be helpful   Pro  However  I happily stand by the idea that if you don t understand the answers to those questions for code that you developed yourself or that you ve become familiar with  spending all your time in a debugger is not the solution  it s part of the problem   Before hitting  Post Your Answer  I did a quick Google check for this exact phrase  it turns out that I m not the only one who has held this opinion or used this phrase   I turned up a long discussion of this very question on the Fog Creek software forum  which cited various luminaries including Linus Torvalds as notable proponents

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Inheritance is evil and should be deprecated   The truth is aggregation is better in all cases  Static typed OOP languages can t avoid inheritance  it s the only way to describe what method wants from a type  But dynamic languages and duck typing can live without it  Ruby mixins is much more powerful then inheritance and a lot more controllable

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Good Performance VS Elegant Design  They are not mutually exclusive but I can t stand over-designed class structures frameworks that completely have no clue about performance  I don t need to have a string of new This new That new Whatever      to create an object that will tell me it s 5 AM in the morning oh by the way  it s 217 days until Obama s birthday  and the weekend is 2 days away  I only wanted to know if the gym was open   Having balance between the 2 are crucial  The code needs to get nasty when you need to pump out all the processor do something intensive such as reading terabytes of data  Save the elegance for the places that consume the 10  of resources which is probably more than 90  of the code

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Less code is better than more   If the users say  that s it    and your work remains invisible  it s done right   Glory can be found elsewhere

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small code is always better  but then complex    instead of if-else made me realize that sometime large code is more readable

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Singletons are not evil  There is a place for singletons in the real world  and methods to get around them  i e  monostate pattern  are simply singletons in disguise  For instance  a Logger is a perfect candidate for a singleton  Addtionally  so is a message pump  My current app uses distributed computing  and different objects need to be able to send appropriate messages  There should only be one message pump  and everyone should be able to access it  The alternative is passing an object to my message pump everywhere it might be needed and hoping that a new developer doesn t new one up without thinking and wonder why his messages are going nowhere  The uniqueness of the singleton is the most important part  not its availability  The singleton has its place in the world

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Most consulting programmers suck and should not be allowed to write production code   IMHO-Probably about 60  or more

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Opinion  explicit variable declaration is a great thing     I ll never understand the  wisdom  of letting the developer waste costly time tracking down runtime errors caused by variable name typos instead of simply letting the compiler interpreter catch them   Nobody s ever given me an explanation better than  well it saves time since I don t have to write  int i      Uhhhhh    yeah  sure  but how much time does it take to track down a runtime error

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All variables properties should be readonly final by default   The reasoning is a bit analogous to the sealed argument for classes  put forward by Jon  One entity in a program should have one job  and one job only  In particular  it makes absolutely no sense for most variables and properties to ever change value  There are basically two exceptions    Loop variables  But then  I argue that the variable actually doesn t change value at all  Rather  it goes out of scope at the end of the loop and is re-instantiated in the next turn  Therefore  immutability would work nicely with loop variables and everyone who tries to change a loop variable s value by hand should go straight to hell  Accumulators  For example  imagine the case of summing over the values in an array  or even a list string that accumulates some information about something else   Today  there are better means to accomplish the same goal  Functional languages have higher-order functions  Python has list comprehension and  NET has LINQ  In all these cases  there is no need for a mutable accumulator   result holder   Consider the special case of string concatenation  In many environments   NET  Java   strings are actually immutables  Why then allow an assignment to a string variable at all  Much better to use a builder class  i e  a StringBuilder  all along    I realize that most languages today just aren t built to acquiesce in my wish  In my opinion  all these languages are fundamentally flawed for this reason  They would lose nothing of their expressiveness  power  and ease of use if they would be changed to treat all variables as read-only by default and didn t allow any assignment to them after their initialization

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USE of Desgin patterns and documentation   in web devlopment whats use of these things never felt any use of it

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Bad Programmers are Language-Agnostic  A really bad programmer can write bad code in almost any language

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Logger configs are a waste of time   Why have them if it means learning a new syntax  especially one that fails silently   Don t get me wrong  I love good logging   I love logger inheritance and adding formatters to handlers to loggers   But why do it in a config file   Do you want to make changes to logging code without recompiling   Why   If you put your logging code in a separate class  file  whatever  what difference will it make   Do you want to distribute a configurable log with your product to clients   Doesn t this just give too much information anyway   The most frustrating thing about it is that popular utilities written in a popular language tend to write good APIs in the format that language specifies   Write a Java logging utility and I know you ve generated the javadocs  which I know how to navigate   Write a domain specific language for your logger config and what do we have   Maybe there s documentation  but where the heck is it   You decide on a way to organize it  and I m just not interested in following your line of thought

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I believe in the Zen of Python

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If you haven t read a man page  you re not a real programmer

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You need to watch out for Object-Obsessed Programmers   e g  if you write a class that models built-in types such as ints or floats  you may be an object-obsessed programmer

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Most Programmers are Useless at Programming   You did say  controversial    I was sat in my office at home pondering some programming problem and I ended up looking at my copy of  Complete Spectrum ROM Disassembly  on my bookshelf and thinking    How many programmers today could write the code used in the Spectrum s ROM    The Spectrum  for those unfamiliar with it  had a Basic programming language that could do simple 2D graphics  lines  curves   file IO of a sort and floating point calculations including transendental functions all in 16K of Z80 code  a  lt  5Mhz 8bit processor that had no FPU or integer multiply   Most graduates today would have trouble writing a  Hello World  program that was that small   I think the problem is that the absolute number of programmers that could do that has hardly changed but as a percentage it is quickly approaching zero  Which means that the quality of code being written is decreasing as more sub-par programmers enter the field   Where I m currently working  there are seven programmers including myself  Of these  I m the only one who keeps up-to-date by reading blogs  books  this site  etc and doing programming  for fun  at home  my wife is constantly amazed by this   There s one other programmer who is keen to write well structured code  interestingly  he did a lot of work using Delphi  and to refactor poor code  The rest are  well  not great  Thnking about it  you could describe them as  brute force  programmers - will force inappropriate solutions until they work after a fashion  e g  using C  arrays with repeated array Resize to dynamically add items instead of using a List    Now  I don t know if the place I m currently at is typical  although from my previous positions I would say it is  With the benefit of hindsight  I can see common patterns  that certainly didn t help any of the projects  lack of peer review of code for one    So  5 out of 7 programmers are rubbish   Skizz

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In my workplace  I ve been trying to introduce more Agile XP development habits   Continuous Design is the one I ve felt most resistance on so far   Maybe I shouldn t have phrased it as  let s round up all of the architecture team and shoot them

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Controversial to self  because some things are better be left unsaid  so you won t be painted by others as too egotist   However  here it is   If it is to be  it begins with me

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A Clever Programmer Is Dangerous  I have spent more time trying to fix code written by  clever  programmers  I d rather have a good programmer than an exceptionally smart programmer who wants to prove how clever he is by writing code that only he  or she  can interpret

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Opinion  Never ever have different code between  debug  and  release  builds  The main reason being that release code almost never gets tested  Better to have the same code running in test as it is in the wild

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Whenever you expose a mutable class to the outside world  you should provide events to make it possible to observe its mutation  The extra effort may also convince you to make it immutable after all

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As most others here  I try to adhere to principles like DRY and not being a human compiler   Another strategy I want to push is  tell  don t ask   Instead of cluttering all objects with getters setters essentially making a sieve of them  I d like to tell them to do stuff   This seems to got straight against good enterprise practices with dumb entity objects and thicker service layer that does plenty of asking   Hmmm  thoughts

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If you have ever let anyone from rentacoder com touch your project  both it and your business are completely devoid of worth

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Unnamed  tuples are evil   If you re using tuples as a container for several objects with unique meanings  use a class instead  If you re using them to hold several objects that should be accessible by index  use a list  If you re using them to return multiple values from a method  use Out parameters instead  this does require that your language supports pass-by-reference  If it s part of a code obfuscation strategy  keep using them    I see people using tuples just because they re too lazy to bother giving NAMES to their objects  Users of the API are then forced to access items in the tuple based on a meaningless index instead of a useful name

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Development teams should be segregated more often by technological architectural layers instead of business function   I come from a general culture where developers own  everything from web page to stored procedure   So in order to implement a feature in the system application  they would prepare the database table schemas  write the stored procs  match the data access code  implement the business logic and web service methods  and the web page interfaces   And guess what  Everybody has their own way to doing things  Everyone struggles to learn the ASP NET AJAX and Telerik or Infragistic suites  Enterprise Library or other productivity and data layer and persistence frameworks  Aspect-oriented frameworks  logging and caching application blocks  DB2 or Oracle percularities  And guess what  Everybody takes heck of a long time to learn how to do things the proper way  Meaning  lots of mistakes in the meantime and plenty of resulting defects and performance bottlenecks  And heck of a longer time to fix them  Across each and every layer  Everybody has a hand in every Visual Studio project  Nobody is specialised to handle and optmise one problem technology domain  Too many chefs spoil the soup  All the chefs result in some radioactive goo   Developers may have cross-layer domain responsibilities  but they should not pretend that they can be masters of all disciplines  and should be limited to only a few  In my experience  when a project is not a small one and utilises lots of technologies  covering more business functions in a single layer is more productive  as well as encouraging more test code test that layer  than covering less business functions spanning the entire architectural stack  which motivates developers to test only via their UI and not test code

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This one is not exactly on programming  because html css are not programming languages   Tables are ok for layout  css and divs can t do everything  save yourself the hassle and use a simple table  then use css on top of it

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The latest design patterns tend to be so much snake oil   As has been said previously in this question  overuse of design patterns can harm a design much more than help it     If I hear one more person saying that  everyone should be using IOC   or some similar pile of turd   I think I ll be forced to hunt them down and teach them the error of their ways

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Usability problems are never the user s fault   I cannot count how often a problem turned up when some user did something that everybody in the team considered  just a stupid thing to do   Phrases like  why would somebody do that   or  why doesn t he just do XYZ  usually come up   Even though many are weary of hearing me say this  if a real-life user tried to do something that either did not work  caused something to go wrong or resulted in unexpected behaviour  then it can be anybody s fault  but not the user s   Please note that I do not mean people who intentionally misuse the software  I am referring to the presumable target group of the software

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Manually halting a program is an effective  proven way to find performance problems   Believable  Not to most  True  Absolutely   Programmers are far more judgmental than necessary   Witness all the things considered  evil  or  horrible  in these posts   Programmers are data-structure-happy   Witness all the discussions of classes  inheritance  private-vs-public  memory management  etc   versus how to analyze requirements

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Everything should be made as simple as possible  but not simpler   - Einstein

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Programmers who don t code in their spare time for fun will never become as good as those that do   I think even the smartest and most talented people will never become truly good programmers unless they treat it as more than a job  Meaning that they do little projects on the side  or just mess with lots of different languages and ideas in their spare time    Note  I m not saying good programmers do nothing else than programming  but they do more than program from 9 to 5

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Never make up your mind on an issue before thoroughly considering said issue  No programming standard EVER justifies approaching an issue in a poor manner  If the standard demands a class to be written  but after careful thought  you deem a static method to be more appropriate  always go with the static method  Your own discretion is always better than even the best forward thinking of whoever wrote the standard  Standards are great if you re working in a team  but rules are meant to be broken  in good taste  of course

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If you need to read the manual  the software isn t good enough   Plain and simple  -

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When someone dismisses an entire programming language as  clumsy   it usually turns out he doesn t know how to use it

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Neither Visual Basic or C  trumps the other   They are pretty much the same  save some syntax and formatting

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MVC for the web should be far simpler than traditional MVC     Traditional MVC involves code that  listens  for  events  so that the view can continually be updated to reflect the current state of the model   In the web paradigm however  the web server already does the listening  and the request is the event   Therefore MVC for the web need only be a specific instance of the mediator pattern  controllers mediating between views and the model   If a web framework is crafted properly  a re-usable core should probably not be more than 100 lines   That core need only implement the  page controller  paradigm but should be extensible so as to be able to support the  front controller  paradigm   Below is a method that is the crux of my own framework  used successfully in an embedded consumer device manufactured by a Fortune 100 network hardware manufacturer  for a Fortune 50 media company   My approach has been likened to Smalltalk by a former Smalltalk programmer and author of an Oreilly book about the most prominent Java web framework ever  furthermore I have ported the same framework to mod python psp   static function sendResponse IBareBonesController  controller       controller- gt setMto  controller- gt applyInputToModel        controller- gt mto- gt applyModelToView

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Once i saw the following from a co-worker   equal   a CompareTo b     0   I stated that he cannot assume that in a general case  but he just laughed

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We do a lot of development here using a Model-View-Controller framework we built  I m often telling my developers that we need to violate the rules of the MVC design pattern to make the site run faster  This is a hard sell for developers  who are usually unwilling to sacrifice well-designed code for anything  But performance is our top priority in building web applications  so sometimes we have to make concessions in the framework   For example  the view layer should never talk directly to the database  right  But if you are generating large reports  the app will use a lot of memory to pass that data up through the model and controller layers  If you have a database that supports cursors  it can make the app a lot faster to hit the database directly from the view layer   Performance trumps development standards  that s my controversial view

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Unit Testing won t help you write good code  The only reason to have Unit tests is to make sure that code that already works doesn t break   Writing tests first  or writing code to the tests is ridiculous   If you write to the tests before the code  you won t even know what the edge cases are  You could have code that passes the tests but still fails in unforeseen circumstances   And furthermore  good developers will keep cohesion low  which will make the addition of new code unlikely to cause problems with existing stuff   In fact  I ll generalize that even further    Most  Best Practices  in Software Engineering are there to keep bad programmers from doing too much damage    They re there to hand-hold bad developers and keep them from making dumbass mistakes  Of course  since most developers are bad  this is a good thing  but good developers should get a pass

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Opinion  There should not be any compiler warnings  only errors  Or  formulated differently You should always compile your code with -Werror   Reason  Either the compiler thinks it is something which should be corrected  in case it should be an error  or it is not necessary to fix  in which case the compiler should just shut up

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This one is mostly web related but     Use Tables for your web page layouts  If I was developing a gigantic site that needed to squeeze performance I might think about it  but nothing gives me an easier way to get a consistent look out on the browser than tables  The majority of applications that I develop are for around 100-1000 users and possible 100 at a time max   The extra bloat of the tables aren t killing my server by any means

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Development teams should be segregated more often by technological architectural layers instead of business function   I come from a general culture where developers own  everything from web page to stored procedure   So in order to implement a feature in the system application  they would prepare the database table schemas  write the stored procs  match the data access code  implement the business logic and web service methods  and the web page interfaces   And guess what  Everybody has their own way to doing things  Everyone struggles to learn the ASP NET AJAX and Telerik or Infragistic suites  Enterprise Library or other productivity and data layer and persistence frameworks  Aspect-oriented frameworks  logging and caching application blocks  DB2 or Oracle percularities  And guess what  Everybody takes heck of a long time to learn how to do things the proper way  Meaning  lots of mistakes in the meantime and plenty of resulting defects and performance bottlenecks  And heck of a longer time to fix them  Across each and every layer  Everybody has a hand in every Visual Studio project  Nobody is specialised to handle and optmise one problem technology domain  Too many chefs spoil the soup  All the chefs result in some radioactive goo   Developers may have cross-layer domain responsibilities  but they should not pretend that they can be masters of all disciplines  and should be limited to only a few  In my experience  when a project is not a small one and utilises lots of technologies  covering more business functions in a single layer is more productive  as well as encouraging more test code test that layer  than covering less business functions spanning the entire architectural stack  which motivates developers to test only via their UI and not test code

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Copy Paste IS the root of all evil

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Java is not the best thing out there  Just because it comes with an  Enterprise  sticker does not make it good  Nor does it make it fast  Nor does it make it the answer to every question   Also  ROR is not all it is cracked up to be by the Blogsphere   While I am at it  OOP is not always good  In fact  I think it is usually bad

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Architects that do not code are useless   That sounds a little harsh  but it s not unreasonable  If you are the  architect  for a system  but do not have some amount of hands-on involvement with the technologies employed then how do you get the respect of the development team  How do you influence direction   Architects need to do a lot more  meet with stakeholders  negotiate with other teams  evaluate vendors  write documentation  give presentations  etc   But  if you never see code checked in from by your architect    be wary

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Women make better programmers than men   The female programmers I ve worked with don t get wedded to  their  code as much as men do  They re much more open to criticism and new ideas

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Code Generation is bad  I hate languages that require you to make use of code generation  or copy amp paste  for simple things  like JavaBeans with all their Getters and Setters   C  s AutoProperties are a step in the right direction  but for nice DTOs with Fields  Properties and Constructor parameters you still need a lot of redundancy

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C   is a good language  I practically got lynched in another question a week or two back for saying that C   wasn t a very nice language  So now I ll try saying the opposite      No  seriously  the point I tried to make then  and will try again now  is that C   has plenty of flaws  It s hard to deny that  It s so extremely complicated that learning it well is practically something you can dedicate your entire life to  It makes many common tasks needlessly hard  allows the user to plunge head-first into a sea of undefined behavior and unportable code  with no warnings given by the compiler   But it s not the useless  decrepit  obsolete  hated language that many people try to make it  It shouldn t be swept under the carpet and ignored  The world wouldn t be a better place without it  It has some unique strengths that  unfortunately  are hidden behind quirky syntax  legacy cruft and not least  bad C   teachers  But they re there   C   has many features that I desperately miss when programming in C  or other  modern  languages  There s a lot in it that C  and other modern languages could learn from   It s not blindly focused on OOP  but has instead explored and pioneered generic programming  It allows surprisingly expressive compile-time metaprogramming producing extremely efficient  robust and clean code  It took in lessons from functional programming almost a decade before C  got LINQ or lambda expressions   It allows you to catch a surprising number of errors at compile-time through static assertions and other metaprogramming tricks  which eases debugging vastly  and even beats unit tests in some ways   I d much rather catch an error at compile-time than afterwards  when I m running my tests    Deterministic destruction of variables allows RAII  an extremely powerful little trick that makes try finally blocks and C  s using blocks redundant   And while some people accuse it of being  design by committee   I d say yes  it is  and that s actually not a bad thing in this case  Look at Java s class library  How many classes have been deprecated again  How many should not be used  How many duplicate each others  functionality  How many are badly designed   C   s standard library is much smaller  but on the whole  it s remarkably well designed  and except for one or two minor warts  vector lt bool gt   for example   its design still holds up very well  When a feature is added to C   or its standard library  it is subjected to heavy scrutiny  Couldn t Java have benefited from the same   NET too  although it s younger and was somewhat better designed to begin with  is still accumulating a good handful of classes that are out of sync with reality  or were badly designed to begin with   C   has plenty of strengths that no other language can match  It s a good language

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Tcl Tk is the best GUI language toolkit combo ever  It may lack specific widgets and be less good-looking than the new kids on the block  but its model is elegant and so easy to use that one can build working GUIs faster by typing commands interactively than by using a visual interface builder  Its expressive power is unbeatable  other solutions  Gtk  Java   NET  MFC     typically require ten to one hundred LOC to get the same result as a Tcl Tk one-liner  All without even sacrificing readability or stability   pack  label  l -text  Hello world     button  b -text  Quit  -command exit

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Jon Bentley s  Programming Pearls  is no longer a useful tome   http   tinyurl com nom56r

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C   is a good language  I practically got lynched in another question a week or two back for saying that C   wasn t a very nice language  So now I ll try saying the opposite      No  seriously  the point I tried to make then  and will try again now  is that C   has plenty of flaws  It s hard to deny that  It s so extremely complicated that learning it well is practically something you can dedicate your entire life to  It makes many common tasks needlessly hard  allows the user to plunge head-first into a sea of undefined behavior and unportable code  with no warnings given by the compiler   But it s not the useless  decrepit  obsolete  hated language that many people try to make it  It shouldn t be swept under the carpet and ignored  The world wouldn t be a better place without it  It has some unique strengths that  unfortunately  are hidden behind quirky syntax  legacy cruft and not least  bad C   teachers  But they re there   C   has many features that I desperately miss when programming in C  or other  modern  languages  There s a lot in it that C  and other modern languages could learn from   It s not blindly focused on OOP  but has instead explored and pioneered generic programming  It allows surprisingly expressive compile-time metaprogramming producing extremely efficient  robust and clean code  It took in lessons from functional programming almost a decade before C  got LINQ or lambda expressions   It allows you to catch a surprising number of errors at compile-time through static assertions and other metaprogramming tricks  which eases debugging vastly  and even beats unit tests in some ways   I d much rather catch an error at compile-time than afterwards  when I m running my tests    Deterministic destruction of variables allows RAII  an extremely powerful little trick that makes try finally blocks and C  s using blocks redundant   And while some people accuse it of being  design by committee   I d say yes  it is  and that s actually not a bad thing in this case  Look at Java s class library  How many classes have been deprecated again  How many should not be used  How many duplicate each others  functionality  How many are badly designed   C   s standard library is much smaller  but on the whole  it s remarkably well designed  and except for one or two minor warts  vector lt bool gt   for example   its design still holds up very well  When a feature is added to C   or its standard library  it is subjected to heavy scrutiny  Couldn t Java have benefited from the same   NET too  although it s younger and was somewhat better designed to begin with  is still accumulating a good handful of classes that are out of sync with reality  or were badly designed to begin with   C   has plenty of strengths that no other language can match  It s a good language

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Goto is OK   is that controversial enough  Sometimes    so give us the choice  For example  BASH doesn t have goto  Maybe there is some internal reason for this but still  Also  goto is the building block of Assembly language  No if statements for you

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That  erm  people should comment their code  It seems to be pretty controversial around here     The code only tells me what actually it does  not what it was supposed to do  The time I see a function calculating the point value of an Australian Bond Future is the time I want to see some comments that indicate what the coder thought the calculation should be

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The more process you put around programming  the worse the code becomes  I have noticed something in my 8 or so years of programming  and it seems ridiculous  It s that the only way to get quality is to employ quality developers  and remove as much process and formality from them as you can  Unit testing  coding standards  code peer reviews  etc only reduce quality  not increase it  It sounds crazy  because the opposite should be true  more unit testing should lead to better code  great coding standards should lead to more readable code  code reviews should improve the quality of code  but it s not   I think it boils down to the fact we call it  Software Engineering  when really it s design and not engineering at all     Some numbers to substantiate this statement      From the Editor      IEEE Software  November December 2001      Quantifying Soft Factors      by Steve McConnell               Limited Importance of Process Maturity            In comparing medium-size projects    100 000 lines of code   the one with   the worst process will require 1 43   times as much effort as the one with   the best process  all other things   being equal  In other words  the   maximum influence of process maturity   on a project   s productivity is 1 43               What Clark doesn   t emphasize is that   for a program of 100 000 lines of   code  several human-oriented factors   influence productivity more than   process does               The seniority-oriented factors alone    AEXP  LTEX  PEXP  exert an influence   of 3 02  The seven   personnel-oriented factors   collectively  ACAP  AEXP  LTEX    PCAP  PCON  PEXP  and SITE     exert a   staggering influence range of 25 8    This simple fact accounts for much of   the reason that non-process-oriented   organizations such as Microsoft    Amazon com  and other entrepreneurial   powerhouses can experience   industry-leading productivity while   seemingly shortchanging process           The Bottom Line          It turns out that trading process   sophistication for staff continuity    business domain experience  private   offices  and other human-oriented   factors is a sound economic tradeoff    Of course  the best organizations   achieve high motivation and process   sophistication at the same time  and   that is the key challenge for any   leading software organization       Read the article for an explanation of these acronyms

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Coding is an Art  Some people think coding is an art  and others think coding is a science   The  science  faction argues that as the target is to obtain the optimal code for a situation  then coding is the science of studying how to obtain this optimal   The  art  faction argues there are many ways to obtain the optimal code for a situation  the process is full of subjectivity  and that to choose wisely based on your own skills and experience is an art

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Microsoft should stop supporting anything dealing with Visual Basic

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Apparently mine is that Haskell has variables  This is both  trivial   according to at least eight SO users   though nobody can seem to agree on which trivial answer is correct   and a bad question even to ask  according to at least five downvoters and four who voted to close it   Oh  and I  and computing scientests and mathematicians  am wrong  though nobody can provide me a detailed explanation of why

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Here s mine    You don t need  textual  syntax to express objects and their behavior    I subscribe to the ideas of Jonathan Edwards and his Subtext project - http   alarmingdevelopment org

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Making software configurable is a bad idea   Configurable software allows the end-user  or admin etc  to choose too many options  which may not all have been tested together  or rather  if there are more than a very small number  I can guarantee will not have been tested    So I think software which has its configuration hard-coded  but not necessarily shunning constants etc  to JUST WORK is a good idea  Run with sensible defaults  and DO NOT ALLOW THEM TO BE CHANGED   A good example of this is the number of configuration options on Google Chrome - however  this is probably still too many

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You don t have to program everything  I m getting tired that everything  but then everything needs to be stuffed in a program  like that is always faster  everything needs to be webbased  evrything needs to be done via a computer  Please  just use your pen and paper  it s faster and less maintenance

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Most Programmers are Useless at Programming   You did say  controversial    I was sat in my office at home pondering some programming problem and I ended up looking at my copy of  Complete Spectrum ROM Disassembly  on my bookshelf and thinking    How many programmers today could write the code used in the Spectrum s ROM    The Spectrum  for those unfamiliar with it  had a Basic programming language that could do simple 2D graphics  lines  curves   file IO of a sort and floating point calculations including transendental functions all in 16K of Z80 code  a  lt  5Mhz 8bit processor that had no FPU or integer multiply   Most graduates today would have trouble writing a  Hello World  program that was that small   I think the problem is that the absolute number of programmers that could do that has hardly changed but as a percentage it is quickly approaching zero  Which means that the quality of code being written is decreasing as more sub-par programmers enter the field   Where I m currently working  there are seven programmers including myself  Of these  I m the only one who keeps up-to-date by reading blogs  books  this site  etc and doing programming  for fun  at home  my wife is constantly amazed by this   There s one other programmer who is keen to write well structured code  interestingly  he did a lot of work using Delphi  and to refactor poor code  The rest are  well  not great  Thnking about it  you could describe them as  brute force  programmers - will force inappropriate solutions until they work after a fashion  e g  using C  arrays with repeated array Resize to dynamically add items instead of using a List    Now  I don t know if the place I m currently at is typical  although from my previous positions I would say it is  With the benefit of hindsight  I can see common patterns  that certainly didn t help any of the projects  lack of peer review of code for one    So  5 out of 7 programmers are rubbish   Skizz

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Many developers have an underdeveloped sense of where to put things  resulting in messy source code organization at the file  class  and method level  Further  a sizable percentage of such developers are essentially tone-deaf to issues of code organization  Attempts to teach  cajole  threaten  or shame them into keeping their code clean are futile   On any sufficiently successful project  there s usually a developer who does have a good sense of organization very quietly wielding a broom to the code base to keep entropy at bay

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VB sucks While not terribly controversial in general  when you work in a VB house it is

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Opinion  most code out there is crappy  because that s what the programmers WANT it to be   Indirectly  we have been nurturing a culture of extreme creativeness  It s not that I don t think problem solving has creative elements -- it does -- it s just that it s not even remotely the same as something like painting  see Paul Graham s famous  Hackers and Painters  essay     If we bend our industry towards that approach  ultimately it means letting every programmer go forth and whack out whatever highly creative  crazy stuff they want  Of course  for any sizable project  trying to put together dozens of unrelated  unstructured  unplanned bits into one final coherent bit won t work by definition  That s not a guess  or an estimate  it s the state of the industry that we face today  How many times have you seen sub-bits of functionality in a major program that were completely inconsistent with the rest of the code  It s so common now  it s a wonder anyone cause use any of these messes    Convoluted  complicated  ugly stuff that just keeps getting worse and more unstable  If we were building something physical  everyone on the planet would call us out on how horribly ugly and screwed up the stuff is  but because it more or less hidden by being virtual  we are able to get away with some of the worst manufacturing processing that our species will ever see   Can you imagine a car where four different people designed the four different wheels  in four different ways    But the sad part  the controversial part of it all  is that there is absolutely NO reason for it to be this way  other than historically the culture was towards more freedom and less organization  so we stayed that way  and probably got a lot worse   Software development is a joke  but it s a joke because that s what the programmers want it to be  but would never in a million years admit that it was true  a  plot by management  is a better reason for most people     How long will we keep shooting ourselves in the foot  before we wake up and realize that we the ones holding the gun  pointing it and also pulling the trigger   Paul

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Generated documentation is nearly always totally worthless   Or  as a corollary  Your API needs separate sets of documentation for maintainers and users   There are really two classes of people who need to understand your API  maintainers  who must understand the minutiae of your implementation to be effective at their job  and users  who need a high-level overview  examples  and thorough details about the effects of each method they have access to   I have never encountered generated documentation that succeeded in either area   Generally  when programmers write comments for tools to extract and make documentation out of  they aim for somewhere in the middle--just enough implementation detail to bore and confuse users yet not enough to significantly help maintainers  and not enough overview to be of any real assistance to users   As a maintainer  I d always rather have clean  clear comments  unmuddled by whatever strange markup your auto-doc tool requires  that tell me why you wrote that weird switch statement the way you did  or what bug this seemingly-redundant parameter check fixes  or whatever else I need to know to actually keep the code clean and bug-free as I work on it   I want this information right there in the code  adjacent to the code it s about  so I don t have to hunt down your website to find it in a state that lends itself to being read   As a user  I d always rather have a thorough  well-organized document  a set of web pages would be ideal  but I d settle for a well-structured text file  too  telling me how your API is architectured  what methods do what  and how I can accomplish what I want to use your API to do   I don t want to see internally what classes you wrote to allow me to do work  or files they re in for that matter   And I certainly don t want to have to download your source so I can figure out exactly what s going on behind the curtain   If your documentation were good enough  I wouldn t have to   That s how I see it  anyway

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There are far too many programmers who write far too much code

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Preconditions for arguments to methods functions should be part of the language rather than programmers checking it always

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There is no such thing as Object-Oriented programming

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That  at least during initial design   every Database Table  well  almost every one  should be clearly defined to contain some clearly understanable business entity or system-level domain abstraction  and that whether or not you use it as a a primary key and as Foreign Keys in other dependant tables  some column  attribute  or subset of the table attributes should be clearly defined to represent a unique key for that table  entity abstraction    This is the only way to ensure that the overall table structure represents a logically consistent representation of the complete system data structure  without overlap or misunbderstood flattening   I am a firm believeer in using non-meaningful surrogate keys for Pks and Fks and join functionality   for performance  ease of use  and other reasons   but I beleive the tendency in this direction has taken the database community too far away from the original Cobb principles  and we jhave lost much of the benefits  of database consistency  that natural keys provided     So why not use both

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Don t call virtual methods from constructors    This is only sometimes a PITA  but is only so because in C  I cannot decide at which point in a constructor to call my base class s constructor   Why not   The  NET framework allows it  so what good reason is there for C  to not allow it   Damn

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According to the amount of feedback I ve gotten  my most controversial opinion  apparently  is that programmers don t always read the books they claim to have read   This is followed closely by my opinion that a programmer with a formal education is better than the same programmer who is self-taught  but not necessarily better than a different programmer who is self-taught

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I hate universities and institutes offering short courses for teaching programming to new comers  It is outright disgrace and contempt for the art1 and science of programming    They start teaching C  Java  VB  disgusting  to the people without good grasp on hardware and fundamental principals of computers  The should first be taught about the MACHINE by books like Morris Mano s Computer System Architecture and then taught the concept of instructing machine to solve problems instead of etching semantics and syntax of one programming language   Also I don t understand government schools  colleges teaching children basics of computers using commercial operating systems and softwares  At least in my country  India  not many students afford to buy operating systems and even discounted office suits let alone the development software  juggernaut  compilers  IDEs etc   This prompts theft and piracy and make this act of copying and stealing software from their institutes  libraries a justified act   Again they are taught to use some products not the fundamental ideas   Think about it if you were taught only that 2x2 is 4 and not the concept of multiplication   Or if you were taught now to measure the length of pole inclined to some compound wall of your school but not the Pythagoras theorem

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A programming task is only fun while it s impossible  that is up til the point where you ve convinced yourself you ll be able to solve it successfully    This  I suppose  is why so many of my projects end up halfway finished in a folder called  to be continued

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The C   STL library is so general purpose that it is optimal for no one

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System Data DataSet Rocks   Strongly-typed DataSets are better  in my opinion  than custom DDD objects for most business applications   Reasoning  We re bending over backwards to figure out Unit of Work on custom objects  LINQ to SQL  Entity Framework and it s adding complexity  Use a nice code generator from somewhere to generate the data layer and the Unit of Work sits on the object collections  DataTable and DataSet --no mystery

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Microsoft Windows is the best platform for software development   Reasoning  Microsoft spoils its developers with excellent and cheap development tools  the platform and its API s are well documented  the platform is evolving at a rappid rate which creates a lot of opportunities for developers  The OS has a large user base which is important for obvious commercial reasons  there is a big community of Windows developers  I haven t yet been fired for choosing Microsoft

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Objects Should Never Be In An Invalid State  Unfortunately  so many of the ORM framework mandate zero-arg constructors for all entity classes  using setters to populate the member variables  In those cases  it s very difficult to know which setters must be called in order to construct a valid object   MyClass c   new MyClass       Object in invalid state  Doesn t have an ID  c setId 12345      Now object is valid    In my opinion  it should be impossible for an object to ever find itself in an invalid state  and the class s API should actively enforce its class invariants after every method call   Constructors and mutator methods should atomically transition an object from one valid state to another  This is much better   MyClass c   new MyClass 12345      Object starts out valid  Stays valid    As the consumer of some library  it s a huuuuuuge pain to keep track of whether all the right setters have been invoked before attempting to use an object  since the documentation usually provides no clues about the class s contract

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Microsoft should stop supporting anything dealing with Visual Basic

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Never make up your mind on an issue before thoroughly considering said issue  No programming standard EVER justifies approaching an issue in a poor manner  If the standard demands a class to be written  but after careful thought  you deem a static method to be more appropriate  always go with the static method  Your own discretion is always better than even the best forward thinking of whoever wrote the standard  Standards are great if you re working in a team  but rules are meant to be broken  in good taste  of course

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I firmly believe that unmanaged code isn t worth the trouble   The extra maintainability expenses associated with hunting down memory leaks which even the best programmers introduce occasionally far outweigh the performance to be gained from a language like C     If Java  C   etc  can t get the performance you need  buy more machines

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Test Constantly  You have to write tests  and you have to write them FIRST  Writing tests changes the way you write your code  It makes you think about what you want it to actually do before you just jump in and write something that does everything except what you want it to do    It also gives you goals  Watching your tests go green gives you that little extra bump of confidence that you re getting something accomplished   It also gives you a basis for writing tests for your edge cases  Since you wrote the code against tests to begin with  you probably have some hooks in your code to test with   There is not excuse not to test your code  If you don t you re just lazy  I also think you should test first  as the benefits outweigh the extra time it takes to code this way

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Hibernate is useless and damaging to the minds of developers

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The ability to create UML diagrams similar to pretzels with mad cow disease is not actually a useful software development skill   The whole point of diagramming code is to visualise connections  to see the shape of a design  But once you pass a certain rather low level of complexity  the visualisation is too much to process mentally  Making connections pictorially is only simple if you stick to straight lines  which typically makes the diagram much harder to read than if the connections were cleverly grouped and routed along the cardinal directions   Use diagrams only for broad communication purposes  and only when they re understood to be lies

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Programmers are born  not made

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A degree in computer science does not---and is not supposed to---teach you to be a programmer   Programming is a trade  computer science is a field of study   You can be a great programmer and a poor computer scientist and a great computer scientist and an awful programmer   It is important to understand the difference   If you want to be a programmer  learn Java   If you want to be a computer scientist  learn at least three almost completely different languages   e g   assembler  c  lisp  ruby  smalltalk

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Correct every defect when it s discovered  Not just  severity 1  defects  all defects   Establish a deployment mechanism that makes application updates immediately available to users  but allows them to choose when to accept these updates  Establish a direct communication mechanism with users that enables them to report defects  relate their experience with updates  and suggest improvements   With aggressive testing  many defects can be discovered during the iteration in which they are created  immediately correcting them reduces developer interrupts  a significant contributor to defect creation  Immediately correcting defects reported by users forges a constructive community  replacing product quality with product improvement as the main topic of conversation   Implementing user-suggested improvements that are consistent with your vision and strategy produces community of enthusiastic evangelists

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If you have any idea how to program you are not fit to place a button on a form  Is that controversial enough      No matter how hard we try  it s almost impossible to have appropriate empathy with 53 year old Doris who has to use our order-entry software   We simply cannot grasp the mental model of what she imagines is going on inside the computer  because we don t need to imagine  we know whats going on  or have a very good idea   Interaction Design should be done by non-programmers   Of course  this is never actually going to happen   Contradictorily I m quite glad about that  I like UI design even though deep down I know I m unsuited to it   For further info  read the book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum   Be warned  I found this book upsetting and insulting  it s a difficult read if you are a developer that cares about the user s experience

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XML and HTML are the  assembly language  of the web  Why still hack it   It seems fairly obvious that very few developers these days learn code in assembly language for reason that it s primitive and takes you far away from the problem you have to solve at high-level  So we invented high-level languages to encapsulates those level entities to boost our productivity thru the language elements that we can relate to more at higher level  Just like we can do more with a computer than just its constituent motherboard or CPU   With the Web  it seems to me developers still are reading writing and hacking HTML CSS XMl schemas  etc   I see these as the equivalent of  assembly language  of the Web or its substrates  Should we be done with it   Sure  we need to hack it sometimes when things go wrong  But surely  that s an exception  I assert that we are replacing lower-level assembly language at machine level with its equivalent at Web-level

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My controversial view is that the  While  construct should be removed from all programming languages    You can easily replicate While using  Repeat  and a boolean flag  and I just don t believe that it s useful to have the two structures  In fact  I think that having both  Repeat   Until  and  While  EndWhile  in a language confuses new programmers    Update - Extra Notes  One common mistake new programmers make with While is they assume that the code will break as soon as the tested condition flags false  So - If the While test flags false half way through the code  they assume a break out of the While Loop  This mistake isn t made as much with Repeat    I m actually not that bothered which of the two loops types is kept  as long as there s only one loop type  Another reason I have for choosing Repeat over While is that  While  functionality makes more sense written using  repeat  than the other way around    Second Update  I m guessing that the fact I m the only person currently running with a negative score here means this actually is a controversial opinion   Unlike the rest of you  Ha

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Object Oriented Programming is overused  Sometimes the best answer is the simple answer

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VB 6 could be used for good as well as evil  It was a Rapid Application Development environment in a time of over complicated coding   I have hated VB vehemently in the past  and still mock VB NET  probably in jest  as a Fisher Price language due to my dislike of classical VB  but in its day  nothing could beat it for getting the job done

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Relational databases are awful for web applications   For example    threaded comments tag clouds user search maintaining record view counts providing undo   revision tracking multi-step wizards

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Programmers must do programming on the side  or they re never as good as those who do    As kpollock said  imagine saying that for doctors  or soldiers     The main thing isn t so much as whether they code  but whether they think about it  Computing Science is an intellectual exercise  you don t necessarily need to code to think about problems that makes you better as a programmer   It s not like Einstein gets to play with play with particles and waves when he s off his research

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You must know C to be able to call yoursel a programmer

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coding is not typing  It takes time to write the code  Most of the time in the editor window  you are just looking at the code  not actually typing  Not as often  but quite frequently  you are deleting what you have written  Or moving from one place to another  Or renaming    If you are banging away at the keyboard for a long time you are doing something wrong    Corollary  Number of lines of code written per day is not a linear measurement of a programmers productivity  as programmer that writes 100 lines in a day is quite likely a better programmer then the one that writes 20  but one that writes 5000 is certainly a bad programmer

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Emacs is better

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VB 6 could be used for good as well as evil  It was a Rapid Application Development environment in a time of over complicated coding   I have hated VB vehemently in the past  and still mock VB NET  probably in jest  as a Fisher Price language due to my dislike of classical VB  but in its day  nothing could beat it for getting the job done

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Good Performance VS Elegant Design  They are not mutually exclusive but I can t stand over-designed class structures frameworks that completely have no clue about performance  I don t need to have a string of new This new That new Whatever      to create an object that will tell me it s 5 AM in the morning oh by the way  it s 217 days until Obama s birthday  and the weekend is 2 days away  I only wanted to know if the gym was open   Having balance between the 2 are crucial  The code needs to get nasty when you need to pump out all the processor do something intensive such as reading terabytes of data  Save the elegance for the places that consume the 10  of resources which is probably more than 90  of the code

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In my workplace  I ve been trying to introduce more Agile XP development habits   Continuous Design is the one I ve felt most resistance on so far   Maybe I shouldn t have phrased it as  let s round up all of the architecture team and shoot them

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A random collection of Cook s aphorisms      The hardest language to learn is your second  The hardest OS to learn is your second one - especially if your first was an IBM mainframe  Once you ve learned several seemingly different languages  you finally realize that all programming languages are the same - just minor differences in syntax  Although one can be quite productive and marketable without having learned any assembly  no one will ever have a visceral understanding of computing without it  Debuggers are the final refuge for programmers who don t really know what they re doing in the first place  No OS will ever be stable if it doesn t make use of hardware memory management  Low level systems programming is much  much easier than applications programming  The programmer who has a favorite language is just playing  Write the User s Guide FIRST  Policy and procedure are intended for those who lack the initiative to perform otherwise   The Contractor s Creed   Tell em what they need  Give em what they want  Make sure the check clears  If you don t find programming fun  get out of it or accept that although you may make a living at it  you ll never be more than average  Just as the old farts have to learn the  NET method names  you ll have to learn the library calls   But there s nothing new there  The life of a programmer is one of constantly adapting to different environments  and the more tools you have hung on your belt  the more versatile and marketable you ll be  You may piddle around a bit with little code chunks near the beginning to try out some ideas  but  in general  one doesn t start coding in earnest until you KNOW how the whole program or app is going to be layed out  and you KNOW that the whole thing is going to work EXACTLY as advertised   For most projects with at least some degree of complexity  I generally end up spending 60 to 70 percent of the time up front just percolating ideas  Understand that programming has little to do with language and everything to do with algorithm  All of those nifty geegaws with memorable acronyms that folks have come up with over the years are just different ways of skinning the implementation cat   When you strip away all the OOPiness  RADology  Development Methodology 37  and Best Practice 42  you still have to deal with the basic building blocks of    assignments conditionals iterations control flow I O    Once you can truly wrap yourself around that  you ll eventually get to the point where you see  from a programming standpoint  little difference between writing an inventory app for an auto parts company  a graphical real-time TCP performance analyzer  a mathematical model of a stellar core  or an appointments calendar    Beginning programmers work with small chunks of code   As they gain experience  they work with ever increasingly large chunks of code  As they gain even more experience  they work with small chunks of code

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A Good Programmer Hates Coding  Similar to  A Good Programmer is a Lazy Programmer  and  Less Code is Better   But by following this philosophy  I have managed to write applications which might otherwise use several times as much code  and take several times as much development time   In short  think before you code  Most of the parts of my own programs which end up causing problems later were parts that I actually enjoyed coding  and thus had too much code  and thus were poorly written  Just like this paragraph   A Good Programmer is a Designer  I ve found that programming uses the same concepts as design  as in  the same design concepts used in art   I m not sure most other programmers find the same thing to be true  maybe it is a right brain left brain thing  Too many programs out there are ugly  from their code to their command line user interface to their graphical user interface  and it is clear that the designers of these programs were not  in fact  designers   Although correlation may not  in this case  imply causation  I ve noticed that as I ve become better at design  I ve become better at coding  The same process of making things fit and feel right can and should be used in both places  If code doesn t feel right  it will cause problems because either a  it is not right  or b  you ll assume it works in a way that  feels right  later  and it will then again be not right   Art and code are not on opposite ends of the spectrum  code can be used in art  and can itself be a form of art   Disclaimer  Not all of my code is pretty or  right   unfortunately

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That the  clarification of ideas  should not be the sole responsibility of the developer   and yes xkcd made me use that specific phrase     To often we are handed project s that are specified in psuedo-meta-sorta-kinda-specific  code  if you want to call it that   There are often product managers who draw up the initial requiements for a project and perform next to 0  of basic logic validation   I m not saying that the technical approach shouldn t be drawn up by the architect  or that the speicifc implemntation shouldn t be the responsibility of the developer  but rather that it should the requirement of the product manager to ensure that their requirements are logically feasible   Personally I ve been involved in too many  simple  projects that encounter a little scope creep here and there and then come across a  small  change or feature addition which contradicts previous requirements--whether implicitly or explicitly   In these cases it is all too easy for the person requesting the borderline-impossible change to become enraged that developers can t make their dream a reality

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Explicit self in Python s method declarations is poor design choice  Method calls got syntactic sugar  but declarations didn t  It s a leaky abstraction  by design   that causes annoying errors  including runtime errors with apparent off-by-one error in reported number of arguments

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Most comments in code are in fact a pernicious form of code duplication   We spend most of our time maintaining code written by others  or ourselves  and poor  incorrect  outdated  misleading comments must be near the top of the list of most annoying artifacts in code   I think eventually many people just blank them out  especially those flowerbox monstrosities   Much better to concentrate on making the code readable  refactoring as necessary  and minimising idioms and quirkiness   On the other hand  many courses teach that comments are very nearly more important than the code itself  leading to the this next line adds one to invoiceTotal style of commenting

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C   is one of the WORST programming languages - EVER   It has all of the hallmarks of something designed by committee - it does not do any given job well  and does some jobs  like OO  terribly  It has a  kitchen sink  desperation to it that just won t go away   It is a horrible  first language  to learn to program with  You get no elegance  no assistance  from the language   Instead you have bear traps and mine fields  memory management  templates  etc     It is not a good language to try to learn OO concepts  It behaves as  C with a class wrapper  instead of a proper OO language   I could go on  but will leave it at that for now  I have never liked programming in C    and although I  cut my teeth  on FORTRAN  I totally loved programming in C  I still think C was one of the great  classic  languages  Something that C   is certainly NOT  in my opinion   Cheers   -R  EDIT  To respond to the comments on teaching C    You can teach C   in two ways - either teaching it as C  on steroids   start with variables  conditions  loops  etc   or teaching it as a pure  OO  language  start with classes  methods  etc   You can find teaching texts that use one or other of these approaches  I prefer the latter approach  OO first  as it does emphasize the capabilities of C   as an OO language  which was the original design emphasis of C     If you want to teach C    as C   then I think you should teach C  not C     But the problem with C   as a first language in my experience is that the language is simply too BIG to teach in one semester  plus most  intro  texts try and cover everything  It is simply not possible to cover all the topics in a  first language  course  You have to at least split it into 2 semesters  and then it s no longer  first language   IMO   I do teach C    but only as a  new language  - that is  you must be proficient in some prior  pure  language  not scripting or macros  before you can enroll in the course  C   is a very fine  second language  to learn  IMO   -R   Nother Edit   to Konrad   I do not at all agree that C    is superior in every way  to C  I spent years coding C programs for microcontrollers and other embedded applications  The C compilers for these devices are highly optimized  often producing code as good as hand-coded assembler  When you move to C    you gain a tremendous overhead imposed by the compiler in order to manage language features you may not use  In embedded applications  you gain little by adding classes and such  IMO  What you need is tight  clean code  You can write it in C    but then you re really just writing C  and the C compilers are more optimized in these applications   I wrote a MIDI engine  first in C  later in C    at the vendor s request  for an embedded controller  sound card   In the end  to meet the performance requirements  MIDI timings  etc  we had to revert to pure C for all of the core code  We were able to use C   for the high-level code  and having classes was very sweet - but we needed C to get the performance at the lower level  The C code was an order of magnitude faster than the C   code  but hand coded assembler was only slightly faster than the compiled C code  This was back in the early 1990s  just to place the events properly   -R

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Although I m in full favor of Test-Driven Development  TDD   I think there s a vital step before developers even start the full development cycle of prototyping a solution to the problem   We too often get caught up trying to follow our TDD practices for a solution that may be misdirected because we don t know the domain well enough  Simple prototypes can often elucidate these problems   Prototypes are great because you can quickly churn through and throw away more code than when you re writing tests first  sometimes   You can then begin the development process with a blank slate but a better understanding

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If you re a developer  you should be able to write code  I did quite a bit of interviewing last year  and for my part of the interview I was supposed to test the way people thought  and how they implemented simple-to-moderate algorithms on a white board  I d initially started out with questions like      Given that Pi can be estimated using the function 4    1 - 1 3   1 5 - 1 7        with more terms giving greater accuracy  write a function that calculates Pi to an accuracy of 5 decimal places    It s a problem that should make you think  but shouldn t be out of reach to a seasoned developer  it can be answered in about 10 lines of C    However  many of our  supposedly pre-screened by the agency  candidates couldn t even begin to answer it  or even explain how they might go about answering it  So after a while I started asking simpler questions like      Given the area of a circle is given by Pi times the radius squared  write a function to calculate the area of a circle    Amazingly  more than half the candidates couldn t write this function in any language  I can read most popular languages so I let them use any language of their choice  including pseudo-code   We had  C  developers  who could not write this function in C    I was surprised by this  I had always thought that developers should be able to write code  It seems that  nowadays  this is a controversial opinion  Certainly it is amongst interview candidates     Edit   There s a lot of discussion in the comments about whether the first question is a good or bad one  and whether you should ask questions as complex as this in an interview  I m not going to delve into this here  that s a whole new question  apart from to say you re largely missing the point of the post    Yes  I said people couldn t make any headway with this  but the second question is trivial and many people couldn t make any headway with that one either  Anybody who calls themselves a developer should be able to write the answer to the second one in a few seconds without even thinking  And many can t

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PHP sucks  -   The proof is in the pudding

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VB sucks While not terribly controversial in general  when you work in a VB house it is

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My one   Long switch statements are your friends  Really  At least in C    People tend to avoid and discourage others to use long switch statements beause they are  unmanagable  and  have bad performance characteristics    Well  the thing is that in C   switch statements are always compiled automagically to hash jump tables so actually using them is the Best Thing To Do    in terms of performance if you need simple branching to multiple branches  Also  if the case statements are organized and grouped intelligently  for example in alphabetical order   they are not unmanageable at all

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Controversial to self  because some things are better be left unsaid  so you won t be painted by others as too egotist   However  here it is   If it is to be  it begins with me

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Classes should fit on the screen   If you have to use the scroll bar to see all of your class  your class is too big     Code folding and miniature fonts are cheating

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Extension Methods are the work of the Devil  Everyone seems to think that extension methods in  Net are the best thing since sliced bread  The number of developers singing their praises seems to rise by the minute but I m afraid I can t help but despise them and unless someone can come up with a brilliant justification or example that I haven t already heard then I will never write one  I recently came across this thread and I must say reading the examples of the highest voted extensions made me feel a little like vomiting  metaphorically of course    The main reasons given for their extensiony goodness are increased readability  improved OO-ness and the ability to chain method calls better   I m afraid I have to differ  I find in fact that they  unequivocally  reduce readability and OO-ness by virtue of the fact that they are at their core a lie  If you need a utility method that acts upon an object then write a utility method that acts on that object don t lie to me  When I see aString SortMeBackwardsUsingKlingonSortOrder then string should have that method because that is telling me something about the string object not something about the AnnoyingNerdReferences StringUtilities class   LINQ was designed in such a way that chained method calls are necessary to avoid strange and uncomfortable expressions and the extension methods that arise from LINQ are understandable but in general chained method calls reduce readability and lead to code of the sort we see in obfuscated Perl contests   So  in short  extension methods are evil  Cast off the chains of Satan and commit yourself to extension free code

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Programmers are born  not made

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Software Development is a VERY small subset of Computer Science   People sometimes seem to think the two are synonymous  but in reality there are so many aspects to computer science that the average developer rarely  if ever  gets exposed to   Depending on one s career goals  I think there are a lot of CS graduates out there who would probably have been better off with some sort of Software Engineering education   I value education highly  have a BS in Computer science and am pursuing a MS in it part time  but I think that many people who obtain these degrees treat the degree as a means to an end and benefit very little   I know plenty of people who took the same Systems Software course I took  wrote the same assembler I wrote  and to this day see no value in what they did

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Debuggers are a crutch   It s so controversial that even I don t believe it as much as I used to   Con  I spend more time getting up to speed on other people s voluminous code  so anything that help with  how did I get here  and  what is happening  either pre-mortem or post-mortem can be helpful   Pro  However  I happily stand by the idea that if you don t understand the answers to those questions for code that you developed yourself or that you ve become familiar with  spending all your time in a debugger is not the solution  it s part of the problem   Before hitting  Post Your Answer  I did a quick Google check for this exact phrase  it turns out that I m not the only one who has held this opinion or used this phrase   I turned up a long discussion of this very question on the Fog Creek software forum  which cited various luminaries including Linus Torvalds as notable proponents

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XML is highly overrated  I think too many jump onto the XML bandwagon before using their brains    XML for web stuff is great  as it s designed for it  Otherwise I think some problem definition and design thoughts should preempt any decision to use it    My 5 cents

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Never change what is not broken

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A Good Programmer Hates Coding  Similar to  A Good Programmer is a Lazy Programmer  and  Less Code is Better   But by following this philosophy  I have managed to write applications which might otherwise use several times as much code  and take several times as much development time   In short  think before you code  Most of the parts of my own programs which end up causing problems later were parts that I actually enjoyed coding  and thus had too much code  and thus were poorly written  Just like this paragraph   A Good Programmer is a Designer  I ve found that programming uses the same concepts as design  as in  the same design concepts used in art   I m not sure most other programmers find the same thing to be true  maybe it is a right brain left brain thing  Too many programs out there are ugly  from their code to their command line user interface to their graphical user interface  and it is clear that the designers of these programs were not  in fact  designers   Although correlation may not  in this case  imply causation  I ve noticed that as I ve become better at design  I ve become better at coding  The same process of making things fit and feel right can and should be used in both places  If code doesn t feel right  it will cause problems because either a  it is not right  or b  you ll assume it works in a way that  feels right  later  and it will then again be not right   Art and code are not on opposite ends of the spectrum  code can be used in art  and can itself be a form of art   Disclaimer  Not all of my code is pretty or  right   unfortunately

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I have two   Design patterns are sometimes a way for bad programmer to write bad code -  when you have a hammer - all the world looks like a nail  mentality  If there si something I hate to hear is two developers create design by patterns   We should use command with facade        There is no such thing as  premature optimization   You should profile and optimize the your code before you get to that point when it becomes too painful to do so

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Software sucks due to a lack of diversity  No offense to any race but things work pretty when a profession is made up of different races and both genders  Just look at overusing non-renewable energy  It is going great because everyone is contributing  not just the  stereotypical guy

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Software engineers should not work with computer science guys  Their differences   SEs care about code reusability  while CSs just suss out code SEs care about performance  while CSs just want to have things done now SEs care about whole structure  while CSs do not give a toss

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Pagination is never what the user wants  If you start having the discussion about where to do pagination  in the database  in the business logic  on the client  etc  then you are asking the wrong question  If your app is giving back more data than the user needs  figure out a way for the user to narrow down what they need based on real criteria  not arbitrary sized chunks  And if the user really does want all those results  then give them all the results  Who are you helping by giving back 20 at a time  The server  Is that more important than your user    EDIT  clarification  based on comments    As a real world example  let s look at this Stack Overflow question   Let s say I have a controversial programming opinion   Before I post  I d like to see if there is already an answer that addresses the same opinion  so I can upvote it   The only option I have is to click through every page of answers   I would prefer one of these options    Allow me to search through the answers  a way for me to narrow down what I need based on real criteria   Allow me to see all the answers so I can use my browser s  find  option  give me all the results     The same applies if I just want to find an answer I previously read  but can t find anymore   I don t know when it was posted or how many votes it has  so the sorting options don t help   And even if I did  I still have to play a guessing game to find the right page of results  The fact that the answers are paginated and I can directly click into one of a dozen pages is no help at all   -- bmb

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Most professional programmers suck  I have come across too many people doing this job for their living who were plain crappy at what they were doing  Crappy code  bad communication skills  no interest in new technology whatsoever  Too many  too many

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Don t use stored procs in your database   The reasons they were originally good - security  abstraction  single connection - can all be done in your middle tier with ORMs that integrate lots of other advantages   This one is definitely controversial   Every time I bring it up  people tear me apart

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That best practices are a hazard because they ask us to substitute slogans for thinking

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Bad Programmers are Language-Agnostic  A really bad programmer can write bad code in almost any language

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For a good programmer language is not a problem   It may be not very controvertial but I hear a lot o whining from other programmers like  why don t they all use delphi     C  sucks    i would change company if they forced me to use java  and so on  What i think is that a good programmer is flexible and is able to write good programms in any programming language that he might have to learn in his life

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Don t write code  remove code   As a smart teacher once told me   Don t write code  Writing code is bad  Removing code is good  and if you have to write code - write small code

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Avoid indentation    Use early returns  continues or breaks   instead of   if  passed    NULL       for x in list             if  peter                    print  peter             more code                                          else                   print  no peter                     do   if  pPassed  NULL      return false   for x in list       if   peter              print  no peter           continue           print  peter      more code

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Anonymous functions suck   I m teaching myself jQuery and  while it s an elegant and immensely useful technology  most people seem to treat it as some kind of competition in maximizing the user of anonymous functions   Function and procedure naming  along with variable naming  is the greatest expressive ability we have in programming   Passing functions around as data is a great technique  but making them anonymous and therefore non-self-documenting is a mistake   It s a lost chance for expressing the meaning of the code

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Programmers should never touch Word  or PowerPoint   Unless you are developing a word or a document processing tool  you should not touch a Word processor that emits only binary blobs  and for that matter   Generated XML files are binary blobs  Programmers should write plain text documents  The documents a programmer writes need to convey intention only  not formatting  It must be producible with the programming tool-chain  editor  version-control  search utilities  build system and the like  When you are already have and know how to use that tool-chain  every other document production tool is a horrible waste of time and effort   When there is a need to produce a document for non-programmers  a lightweight markup language should be used such as reStructuredText  if you are writing a plain text file  you are probably writing your own lightweight markup anyway   and generate HTML  PDF  S5  etc  from it

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QA should know the code  indirectly  better than development  QA gets paid to find things development didn t intend to happen  and they often do      Btw  I m a developer who just values good QA guys a whole bunch -- far to few of them    far to few

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A picture is not worth a thousand words   Some pictures might be worth a thousand words   Most of them are not   This trite old aphorism is mostly untrue and is a pathetic excuse for many a lazy manager who did not want to read carefully created reports and documentation to say  I need you to show me in a diagram    My wife studied for a linguistics major and saw several fascinating proofs against the conventional wisdom on pictures and logos  they do not break across language and cultural barriers  they usually do not communicate anywhere near as much information as correct text  they simply are no substitute for real communication   In particular  labeled bubbles connected with lines are useless if the lines are unlabeled and unexplained  and or if every line has a different meaning instead of signifying the same relationship  unless distinguished from each other in some way    If your lines sometimes signify relationships and sometimes indicate actions and sometimes indicate the passage of time  you re really hosed   Every good programmer knows you use the tool suited for the job at hand  right   Not all systems are best specified and documented in pictures   Graphical specification languages that can be automatically turned into provably-correct  executable code or whatever are a spectacular idea  if such things exist   Use them when appropriate  not for everything under the sun   Entity-Relationship diagrams are great   But not everything can be summed up in a picture   Note  a table may be worth its weight in gold   But a table is not the same thing as a picture   And again  a well-crafted short prose paragraph may be far more suitable for the job at hand

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Commenting is bad  Whenever code needs comments to explain what it is doing  the code is too complicated  I try to always write code that is self-explanatory enough to not need very many comments

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Enable multiple checkout If we improve enough discipline of the developers  we will get much more efficiency from this setting by auto merge of source control

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Opinion  Not having function definitions  and return types can lead to flexible and readable code   This opinion probably applies more to interpreted languages than compiled  Requiring a return type  and a function argument list  are great for things like intellisense to auto document your code  but they are also restrictions    Now don t get me wrong  I am not saying throw away return types  or argument lists  They have their place  And 90  of the time they are more of a benefit than a hindrance   There are times and places when this is useful

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Every developer should be familiar with the basic architecture of modern computers  This also applies to developers who target a virtual machine  maybe even more so  because they have been told time and time again that they don t need to worry themselves with memory management etc

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I have a few    there s exceptions to everything so these are not hard and fast but they do apply in most cases  Nobody cares if your website validates  is XHTML strict  is standards-compliant  or has a W3C badge    It may earn you some high-fives from fellow Web developers  but the rest of people looking at your site could give a crap whether you ve validated your code or not  the vast majority of Web surfers are using IE or Firefox  and since both of those browsers are forgiving of nonstandards  nonstrict  invalidated HTML then you really dont need to worry about it  If you ve built a site for a car dealer  a mechanic  a radio station  a church  or a local small business  how many people in any of those businesses  target demographics do you think care about valid HTML  I d hazard a guess it s pretty close to 0    Most open-source software is useless  overcomplicated crap    Let me install this nice piece of OSS I ve found  It looks like it should do exactly what I want  Oh wait  first I have to install this other window manager thingy  OK  Then i need to get this command-line tool and add it to my path  Now I need the latest runtimes for X  Y  and Z  now i need to make sure i have these processes running  ok  great    its all configured  Now let me learn a whole new set of commands to use it  Oh cool  someone built a GUI for it  I guess I don t need to learn these commands  Wait  I need this library on here to get the GUI to work  Gotta download that now  ok  now its working   crap  I can t figure out this terrible UI    sound familiar  OSS is full of complication for complication s sake  tricky installs that you need to be an expert to perform  and tools that most people wouldn t know what to do with anyway  So many projects fall by the wayside  others are so niche that very few people would use them  and some of the decent ones  FlowPlayer  OSCommerce  etc  have such ridiculously overcomplicated and bloated source code that it defeats the purpose of being able to edit the source  You can edit the source    if you can figure out which of the 400 files contains the code that needs modification  You re really in trouble when you learn that its all 400 of them

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Haven t tested it yet for controversy  but there may be potential   The best line of code is the one you never wrote

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My controversial opinion  Java doesn t suck but Java API s do  Why do java libraries insist on making it hard to do simple tasks  And why  instead of fixing the APIs  do they create frameworks to help manage the boilerplate code  This opinion can apply to any language that requires 10 or more lines of code to read a line from a file

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My controversial opinion is probably that John Carmack  ID Software  Quake etc   is not a very good programmer     Don t get me wrong  he s a very smart programmer in my opinion  but after I noticed the line   define private public  in the quake sourcecode I couldn t help but think he s a guy that gets the job done nomatter what  but in my definition not a good programmer    This opinion has gotten me into a lot of heated discussions though

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It is OK to use short variable names  But not for indices in nested loops

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You need to watch out for Object-Obsessed Programmers   e g  if you write a class that models built-in types such as ints or floats  you may be an object-obsessed programmer

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If you need to read the manual  the software isn t good enough   Plain and simple  -

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The latest design patterns tend to be so much snake oil   As has been said previously in this question  overuse of design patterns can harm a design much more than help it     If I hear one more person saying that  everyone should be using IOC   or some similar pile of turd   I think I ll be forced to hunt them down and teach them the error of their ways

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The worst thing about recursion is recursion

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Most professional programmers suck  I have come across too many people doing this job for their living who were plain crappy at what they were doing  Crappy code  bad communication skills  no interest in new technology whatsoever  Too many  too many

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There are some  very few  legitimate uses for goto  particularly in C  as a stand-in for exception handling

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The more process you put around programming  the worse the code becomes  I have noticed something in my 8 or so years of programming  and it seems ridiculous  It s that the only way to get quality is to employ quality developers  and remove as much process and formality from them as you can  Unit testing  coding standards  code peer reviews  etc only reduce quality  not increase it  It sounds crazy  because the opposite should be true  more unit testing should lead to better code  great coding standards should lead to more readable code  code reviews should improve the quality of code  but it s not   I think it boils down to the fact we call it  Software Engineering  when really it s design and not engineering at all     Some numbers to substantiate this statement      From the Editor      IEEE Software  November December 2001      Quantifying Soft Factors      by Steve McConnell               Limited Importance of Process Maturity            In comparing medium-size projects    100 000 lines of code   the one with   the worst process will require 1 43   times as much effort as the one with   the best process  all other things   being equal  In other words  the   maximum influence of process maturity   on a project   s productivity is 1 43               What Clark doesn   t emphasize is that   for a program of 100 000 lines of   code  several human-oriented factors   influence productivity more than   process does               The seniority-oriented factors alone    AEXP  LTEX  PEXP  exert an influence   of 3 02  The seven   personnel-oriented factors   collectively  ACAP  AEXP  LTEX    PCAP  PCON  PEXP  and SITE     exert a   staggering influence range of 25 8    This simple fact accounts for much of   the reason that non-process-oriented   organizations such as Microsoft    Amazon com  and other entrepreneurial   powerhouses can experience   industry-leading productivity while   seemingly shortchanging process           The Bottom Line          It turns out that trading process   sophistication for staff continuity    business domain experience  private   offices  and other human-oriented   factors is a sound economic tradeoff    Of course  the best organizations   achieve high motivation and process   sophistication at the same time  and   that is the key challenge for any   leading software organization       Read the article for an explanation of these acronyms

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Hardcoding is good   Really  more efficient and much easier to maintain in many cases   The number of times I ve seen constants put into parameter files really how often will you change the freezing point of water or the speed of light   For C programs just hard code these type of values into a header file  for java into a static class etc   When these parameters have a drastic effect on your programs behaviour you really want to do a regresion test on every change  this seems more natural with hard coded values  When things are stored in parameter property files the temptation is to think  this is not a program cahnge so I dont need to test it    The other advantage is it stops people messing with vital values in the parameter property files because there aren t any

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I believe the use of try catch exception handling is worse than the use of simple return codes and associated common messaging structures to ferry useful error messages   Littering code with try catch blocks is not a solution   Just passing exceptions up the stack hoping whats above you will do the right thing or generate an informative error is not a solution   Thinking you have any chance of systematically verifying the proper exception handlers are avaliable to address anything that could go wrong in either transparent or opague objects is not realistic   Think also in terms of late bindings external libraries and unecessary dependancies between unrelated functions in a call stack as system evolves   Use of return codes are simple  can be easily systematically verified for coverage and if handled properly forces developers to generate useful error messages rather than the all-too-common stack dumps and obscure I O exceptions that are  exceptionally  meaningless to even the most clueful of end users   --  My final objection is the use of garbage collected languages   Don t get me wrong   I love them in some circumstances but in general for server MC systems they have no place in my view   GC is not infallable - even extremely well designed GC algorithms can hang on to objects too long or even forever based on non-obvious circular refrences in their dependancy graphs   Non-GC systems following a few simple patterns and use of memory accounting tools don t have this problem but do require more work in design and test upfront than GC environments   The tradeoff here is that memory leaks are extremely easy to spot during testing in Non-GC while finding GC related problem conditions is a much more difficult proposition   Memory is cheap but what happens when you leak expensive objects such as transaction handles  synchronization objects  socket connections   etc   In my environment the very thought that you can just sit back and let the language worry about this for you is unthinkable without significant fundental changes in software description

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Avoid indentation    Use early returns  continues or breaks   instead of   if  passed    NULL       for x in list             if  peter                    print  peter             more code                                          else                   print  no peter                     do   if  pPassed  NULL      return false   for x in list       if   peter              print  no peter           continue           print  peter      more code

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What strikes me as amusing about this question is that I ve just read the first page of answers  and so far  I haven t found a single controversial opinion    Perhaps that says more about the way stackoverflow generates consensus than anything else  Maybe I should have started at the bottom   -

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Writing extensive specifications is futile  It s pretty difficult to write correct programs  but compilers  debuggers  unit tests  testers etc  make it possible to detect and eliminate most errors  On the other hand  when you write specs with a comparable level of detail like a program  i e  pseudocode  UML   you are mostly on your own  Consider yourself lucky if you have a tool that helps you get the syntax right   Extensive specifications are most likely bug riddled  The chance that the writer got it right at the first try is about the same like the chance that a similarily large program is bugfree without ever being tested  Peer reviews eliminate some bugs  just like code reviews do

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One I have been tossing around for a while    The data is the system   Processes and software are built for data  not the other way around     Without data  the process software has little value   Data still has value without a process or software around it   Once we understand the data  what it does  how it interacts  the different forms it exists in at different stages  only then can a solution be built to support the system of data   Successful software systems processes seem to have an acute awareness  if not fanatical mindfulness of  where  the data is at in any given moment

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I think its fine to use goto-statements  if you use them in a sane way  and a sane programming language   They can often make your code a lot easier to read and don t force you to use some twisted logic just to get one simple thing done

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Explicit self in Python s method declarations is poor design choice  Method calls got syntactic sugar  but declarations didn t  It s a leaky abstraction  by design   that causes annoying errors  including runtime errors with apparent off-by-one error in reported number of arguments

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Commenting is bad  Whenever code needs comments to explain what it is doing  the code is too complicated  I try to always write code that is self-explanatory enough to not need very many comments

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1-based arrays should always be used instead of 0-based arrays  0-based arrays are unnatural  unnecessary  and error prone     When I count apples or employees or widgets I start at one  not zero   I teach my kids the same thing   There is no such thing as a 0th apple or 0th employee or 0th widget   Using 1 as the base for an array is much more intuitive and less error-prone   Forget about plus-one-minus-one-hell  as we used to call it    0-based arrays are an unnatural construct invented by the computer science - they do not reflect reality and computer programs should reflect reality as much as possible

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Apparently mine is that Haskell has variables  This is both  trivial   according to at least eight SO users   though nobody can seem to agree on which trivial answer is correct   and a bad question even to ask  according to at least five downvoters and four who voted to close it   Oh  and I  and computing scientests and mathematicians  am wrong  though nobody can provide me a detailed explanation of why

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MVC for the web should be far simpler than traditional MVC     Traditional MVC involves code that  listens  for  events  so that the view can continually be updated to reflect the current state of the model   In the web paradigm however  the web server already does the listening  and the request is the event   Therefore MVC for the web need only be a specific instance of the mediator pattern  controllers mediating between views and the model   If a web framework is crafted properly  a re-usable core should probably not be more than 100 lines   That core need only implement the  page controller  paradigm but should be extensible so as to be able to support the  front controller  paradigm   Below is a method that is the crux of my own framework  used successfully in an embedded consumer device manufactured by a Fortune 100 network hardware manufacturer  for a Fortune 50 media company   My approach has been likened to Smalltalk by a former Smalltalk programmer and author of an Oreilly book about the most prominent Java web framework ever  furthermore I have ported the same framework to mod python psp   static function sendResponse IBareBonesController  controller       controller- gt setMto  controller- gt applyInputToModel        controller- gt mto- gt applyModelToView

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Software development is an art

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Relational databases are awful for web applications   For example    threaded comments tag clouds user search maintaining record view counts providing undo   revision tracking multi-step wizards

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Pagination is never what the user wants  If you start having the discussion about where to do pagination  in the database  in the business logic  on the client  etc  then you are asking the wrong question  If your app is giving back more data than the user needs  figure out a way for the user to narrow down what they need based on real criteria  not arbitrary sized chunks  And if the user really does want all those results  then give them all the results  Who are you helping by giving back 20 at a time  The server  Is that more important than your user    EDIT  clarification  based on comments    As a real world example  let s look at this Stack Overflow question   Let s say I have a controversial programming opinion   Before I post  I d like to see if there is already an answer that addresses the same opinion  so I can upvote it   The only option I have is to click through every page of answers   I would prefer one of these options    Allow me to search through the answers  a way for me to narrow down what I need based on real criteria   Allow me to see all the answers so I can use my browser s  find  option  give me all the results     The same applies if I just want to find an answer I previously read  but can t find anymore   I don t know when it was posted or how many votes it has  so the sorting options don t help   And even if I did  I still have to play a guessing game to find the right page of results  The fact that the answers are paginated and I can directly click into one of a dozen pages is no help at all   -- bmb

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SESE  Single Entry Single Exit  is not law  Example   public int foo        if  someCondition           return 0           return -1      vs   public int foo        int returnValue   -1      if  someCondition           returnValue   0           return returnValue      My team and I have found that abiding by this all the time is actually counter-productive in many cases

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The ability to create UML diagrams similar to pretzels with mad cow disease is not actually a useful software development skill   The whole point of diagramming code is to visualise connections  to see the shape of a design  But once you pass a certain rather low level of complexity  the visualisation is too much to process mentally  Making connections pictorially is only simple if you stick to straight lines  which typically makes the diagram much harder to read than if the connections were cleverly grouped and routed along the cardinal directions   Use diagrams only for broad communication purposes  and only when they re understood to be lies

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Using Stored Procedures  Unless you are writing a large procedural function composed of non-reusable SQL queries  please move your stored procedures of the database and into version control

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All variables properties should be readonly final by default   The reasoning is a bit analogous to the sealed argument for classes  put forward by Jon  One entity in a program should have one job  and one job only  In particular  it makes absolutely no sense for most variables and properties to ever change value  There are basically two exceptions    Loop variables  But then  I argue that the variable actually doesn t change value at all  Rather  it goes out of scope at the end of the loop and is re-instantiated in the next turn  Therefore  immutability would work nicely with loop variables and everyone who tries to change a loop variable s value by hand should go straight to hell  Accumulators  For example  imagine the case of summing over the values in an array  or even a list string that accumulates some information about something else   Today  there are better means to accomplish the same goal  Functional languages have higher-order functions  Python has list comprehension and  NET has LINQ  In all these cases  there is no need for a mutable accumulator   result holder   Consider the special case of string concatenation  In many environments   NET  Java   strings are actually immutables  Why then allow an assignment to a string variable at all  Much better to use a builder class  i e  a StringBuilder  all along    I realize that most languages today just aren t built to acquiesce in my wish  In my opinion  all these languages are fundamentally flawed for this reason  They would lose nothing of their expressiveness  power  and ease of use if they would be changed to treat all variables as read-only by default and didn t allow any assignment to them after their initialization

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You can t measure productivity by counting lines of code   Everyone knows this  but for some reason the practice still persists

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If your text editor doesn t do good code completion  you re wasting everyone s time   Quickly remembering thousands of argument lists  spellings  and return values  not to mention class structures and similarly complex organizational patterns  is a task computers are good at and people  comparatively  are not  I buy wholeheartedly that slowing yourself down a bit and avoiding the gadget feature cult is a great way to increase efficiency and avoid bugs  but there is simply no benefit to spending 30 seconds hunting unnecessarily through sourcecode or docs when you could spend nil    especially if you just need a spelling  which is more often than we like to admit    Granted  if there isn t an editor that provides this functionality for your language  or the task is simple enough to knock out in the time it would take to load a heavier editor  nobody is going to tell you that Eclipse and 90 plugins is the right tool  But please don t tell me that the ability to H-J-K-L your way around like it s 1999 really saves you more time than hitting escape every time you need a method signature    even if you do feel less  hacker  doing it   Thoughts

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Never make up your mind on an issue before thoroughly considering said issue  No programming standard EVER justifies approaching an issue in a poor manner  If the standard demands a class to be written  but after careful thought  you deem a static method to be more appropriate  always go with the static method  Your own discretion is always better than even the best forward thinking of whoever wrote the standard  Standards are great if you re working in a team  but rules are meant to be broken  in good taste  of course

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Open Source software costs more in the long run  For regular Line of Business companies  Open Source looks free but has hidden costs   When you take into account inconsistency of quality  variable usability and UI UX  difficulties of interoperability and standards  increased configuration  associated increased need for training and support  the Total Cost of Ownership for Open Source is much higher than commercial offerings   Tech-savvy programmer-types take the liberation of Open Source and run with it  they  get it  and can adopt it and customise it to suit their purposes  On the other hand  businesses that are primarily non-technical  but need software to run their offices  networks and websites are running the risk of a world of pain for themselves and heavy costs in terms of lost time  productivity and  eventually  support fees and or the cost of abandoning the experiement all together

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Lower level languages are inappropriate for most problems

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Xah Lee  actually has some pretty noteworthy and legitimate viewpoints if you can filter out all the invective  and rationally evaluate statements without agreeing  or disagreeing  based solely on the personality behind the statements  A lot of my  controversial  viewpoints have been echoed by him  and other notorious  trolls  who have criticized languages or tools I use d  on a regular basis   Documentation Generators  http   en wikipedia or  wiki Comparison of documentation generators       the kind where the creator invented some custom-made especially-for-documenting-sourcecode roll-your-own syntax  including  but not limited to JavaDoc  are totally superfluous and a waste of time because    1  They are underused by the people who should be using them the most  and 2  All of these mini-documentation-languages all of them could easily be replaced with YAML

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Once i saw the following from a co-worker   equal   a CompareTo b     0   I stated that he cannot assume that in a general case  but he just laughed

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Objects Should Never Be In An Invalid State  Unfortunately  so many of the ORM framework mandate zero-arg constructors for all entity classes  using setters to populate the member variables  In those cases  it s very difficult to know which setters must be called in order to construct a valid object   MyClass c   new MyClass       Object in invalid state  Doesn t have an ID  c setId 12345      Now object is valid    In my opinion  it should be impossible for an object to ever find itself in an invalid state  and the class s API should actively enforce its class invariants after every method call   Constructors and mutator methods should atomically transition an object from one valid state to another  This is much better   MyClass c   new MyClass 12345      Object starts out valid  Stays valid    As the consumer of some library  it s a huuuuuuge pain to keep track of whether all the right setters have been invoked before attempting to use an object  since the documentation usually provides no clues about the class s contract

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To quote the late E  W  Dijsktra   Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics  the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians   Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes   I don t understand how one can claim to be a proper programmer without being able to solve pretty simple maths problems such as this one  A CRUD monkey - perhaps  but not a programmer

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Every developer should spend several weeks  or even months  developing paper-based systems before they start building electronic ones  They should also then be forced to use their systems   Developing a good paper-based system is hard work  It forces you to take into account human nature  cumbersome processes get ignored  ones that are too complex tend to break down   and teaches you to appreciate the value of simplicity  new work goes in this tray  work for QA goes in this tray  archiving goes in this box    Once you ve worked out how to build a system on paper  it s often a lot easier to build an effective computer system - one that people will actually want to  and be able to  use   The systems we develop are not manned by an army of perfectly-trained automata  real people use them  real people who are trained by managers who are also real people and have far too little time to waste training them how to jump through your hoops   In fact  for my second point   Every developer should be required to run an interactive training course to show users how to use their software

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You only need 3 to 5 languages to do everything  C is a definite  Maybe assembly but you should know it and be able to use it  Maybe javascript and or Java if you code for the web  A shell language like bash and one HLL  like Lisp  which might be useful  Anything else is a distraction

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I have a few    there s exceptions to everything so these are not hard and fast but they do apply in most cases  Nobody cares if your website validates  is XHTML strict  is standards-compliant  or has a W3C badge    It may earn you some high-fives from fellow Web developers  but the rest of people looking at your site could give a crap whether you ve validated your code or not  the vast majority of Web surfers are using IE or Firefox  and since both of those browsers are forgiving of nonstandards  nonstrict  invalidated HTML then you really dont need to worry about it  If you ve built a site for a car dealer  a mechanic  a radio station  a church  or a local small business  how many people in any of those businesses  target demographics do you think care about valid HTML  I d hazard a guess it s pretty close to 0    Most open-source software is useless  overcomplicated crap    Let me install this nice piece of OSS I ve found  It looks like it should do exactly what I want  Oh wait  first I have to install this other window manager thingy  OK  Then i need to get this command-line tool and add it to my path  Now I need the latest runtimes for X  Y  and Z  now i need to make sure i have these processes running  ok  great    its all configured  Now let me learn a whole new set of commands to use it  Oh cool  someone built a GUI for it  I guess I don t need to learn these commands  Wait  I need this library on here to get the GUI to work  Gotta download that now  ok  now its working   crap  I can t figure out this terrible UI    sound familiar  OSS is full of complication for complication s sake  tricky installs that you need to be an expert to perform  and tools that most people wouldn t know what to do with anyway  So many projects fall by the wayside  others are so niche that very few people would use them  and some of the decent ones  FlowPlayer  OSCommerce  etc  have such ridiculously overcomplicated and bloated source code that it defeats the purpose of being able to edit the source  You can edit the source    if you can figure out which of the 400 files contains the code that needs modification  You re really in trouble when you learn that its all 400 of them

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Opinion  Unit tests don t need to be written up front  and sometimes not at all   Reasoning  Developers suck at testing their own code  We do  That s why we generally have test teams or QA groups   Most of the time the code we write is to intertwined with other code to be tested separately  so we end up jumping through patterned hoops to provide testability  Not that those patterns are bad  but they can sometimes add unnecessary complexity  all for the sake of unit testing         which often doesn t work anyway  To write a comprehensive unit test requires alot of time  Often more time than we re willing to give  And the more comprehensive the test  the more brittle it becomes if the interface of the thing it s testing changes  forcing a rewrite of a test that no longer compiles

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Programming is so easy a five year old can do it   Programming in and of itself is not hard  it s common sense  You are just telling a computer what to do    You re not a genius  please get over yourself

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You don t always need a database   If you need to store less than a few thousand  things  and you don t need locking  flat files can work and are better in a lot of ways  They are more portable  and you can hand edit them in a pinch  If you have proper separation between your data and business logic  you can easily replace the flat files with a database if your app ever needs it  And if you design it with this in mind  it reminds you to have proper separation between your data and business logic   -- bmb

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Sometimes it s okay to use regexes to extract something from HTML  Seriously  wrangle with an obtuse parser  or use a quick regex like   lt a href           gt    It s not perfect  but your software will be up and running much quicker  and you can probably use yet another regex to verify that the match that was extracted is something that actually looks like a URL  Sure  it s hacky  and probably fails on several edge-cases  but it s good enough for most usage   Based on the massive volume of  How use regex get HTML   questions that get posted here almost daily  and the fact that every answer is  Use an HTML parser   this should be controversial enough

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I can live without closures   Looks like nowadays everyone and their mother want closures to be present in a language because it is the greatest invention since sliced bread  And I think it is just another hype

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The vast majority of software being developed does not involve the end-user when gathering requirements   Usually it s just some managers who are providing  requirements

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Opinion  most code out there is crappy  because that s what the programmers WANT it to be   Indirectly  we have been nurturing a culture of extreme creativeness  It s not that I don t think problem solving has creative elements -- it does -- it s just that it s not even remotely the same as something like painting  see Paul Graham s famous  Hackers and Painters  essay     If we bend our industry towards that approach  ultimately it means letting every programmer go forth and whack out whatever highly creative  crazy stuff they want  Of course  for any sizable project  trying to put together dozens of unrelated  unstructured  unplanned bits into one final coherent bit won t work by definition  That s not a guess  or an estimate  it s the state of the industry that we face today  How many times have you seen sub-bits of functionality in a major program that were completely inconsistent with the rest of the code  It s so common now  it s a wonder anyone cause use any of these messes    Convoluted  complicated  ugly stuff that just keeps getting worse and more unstable  If we were building something physical  everyone on the planet would call us out on how horribly ugly and screwed up the stuff is  but because it more or less hidden by being virtual  we are able to get away with some of the worst manufacturing processing that our species will ever see   Can you imagine a car where four different people designed the four different wheels  in four different ways    But the sad part  the controversial part of it all  is that there is absolutely NO reason for it to be this way  other than historically the culture was towards more freedom and less organization  so we stayed that way  and probably got a lot worse   Software development is a joke  but it s a joke because that s what the programmers want it to be  but would never in a million years admit that it was true  a  plot by management  is a better reason for most people     How long will we keep shooting ourselves in the foot  before we wake up and realize that we the ones holding the gun  pointing it and also pulling the trigger   Paul

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I often get shouted down when I claim that the code is merely an expression of my design   I quite dislike the way I see so many developers design their system  on the fly  while coding it   The amount of time and effort wasted when one of these cowboys falls off his horse is amazing - and 9 times out of 10 the problem they hit would have been uncovered with just a little upfront design work   I feel that modern methodologies do not emphasize the importance of design in the overall software development process   Eg  the importance placed on code reviews when you haven t even reviewed your design   It s madness

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Whenever you expose a mutable class to the outside world  you should provide events to make it possible to observe its mutation  The extra effort may also convince you to make it immutable after all

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We do a lot of development here using a Model-View-Controller framework we built  I m often telling my developers that we need to violate the rules of the MVC design pattern to make the site run faster  This is a hard sell for developers  who are usually unwilling to sacrifice well-designed code for anything  But performance is our top priority in building web applications  so sometimes we have to make concessions in the framework   For example  the view layer should never talk directly to the database  right  But if you are generating large reports  the app will use a lot of memory to pass that data up through the model and controller layers  If you have a database that supports cursors  it can make the app a lot faster to hit the database directly from the view layer   Performance trumps development standards  that s my controversial view

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If you want to write good software then step away from your computer  Go and hang out with the end users and the people who want and need the software  Only from them will you understand what your software needs to accomplish and how it needs to do that     Ask them what the love  amp  hate about the existing processes   Ask them about the future of their processes  where it is headed  Hang out and see what they use now and figure out their usage patterns  You need to meet and match their usage expectations  See what else they use a lot  particularly if they like it and can use it efficiently  Match that    The end user doesn t give a rat s how elegant your code is or what language it s in  If it works for them and they like using it  you win  If it doesn t make their lives easier and better - they hate it  you lose   Walk a mile in their shoes - then go write your code

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Here s one which has seemed obvious to me for many years but is anathema to everyone else  it is almost always a mistake to switch off C  or C    assertions with NDEBUG in  release  builds   The sole exceptions are where the time or space penalty is unacceptable      Rationale   If an assertion fails  your program has entered a state which    has never been tested the developer was unable to code a recovery strategy for the developer has effectively documented as being inconceivable    Yet somehow  industry best practice  is that the thing should just muddle on and hope for the best when it comes to live runs with your customers  data

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Any sufficiently capable library is too complicated to be useable and any library simple enough to be usable lacks that capabilities needed to be a good general solution   I run in to this constantly   Exhaustive libraries that are so complicated to use I tear my hair out and simple easy to use libraries that don t quite do what I need them to do

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Soon we are going to program in a world without databases  AOP and dependency injection are the GOTO of the 21st century  Building software is a social activity  not a technical one  Joel has a blog

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I am of the opinion that there are too many people making programming decisions that shouldn t be worried about implementation

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Test Constantly  You have to write tests  and you have to write them FIRST  Writing tests changes the way you write your code  It makes you think about what you want it to actually do before you just jump in and write something that does everything except what you want it to do    It also gives you goals  Watching your tests go green gives you that little extra bump of confidence that you re getting something accomplished   It also gives you a basis for writing tests for your edge cases  Since you wrote the code against tests to begin with  you probably have some hooks in your code to test with   There is not excuse not to test your code  If you don t you re just lazy  I also think you should test first  as the benefits outweigh the extra time it takes to code this way

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Write small methods   It seems that programmers love to write loooong methods where they do multiple different things     I think that a method should be created wherever you can name one

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A majority of the  user-friendly  Fourth Generation Languages  SQL included  are worthless overrated pieces of rubbish that should have never made it to common use   4GLs in general have a wordy and ambiguous syntax  Though 4GLs are supposed to allow  non technical people  to write programs  you still need the  technical  people to write and maintain them anyway   4GL programs in general are harder to write  harder to read and harder to optimize than   4GLs should be avoided as far as possible

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A picture is not worth a thousand words   Some pictures might be worth a thousand words   Most of them are not   This trite old aphorism is mostly untrue and is a pathetic excuse for many a lazy manager who did not want to read carefully created reports and documentation to say  I need you to show me in a diagram    My wife studied for a linguistics major and saw several fascinating proofs against the conventional wisdom on pictures and logos  they do not break across language and cultural barriers  they usually do not communicate anywhere near as much information as correct text  they simply are no substitute for real communication   In particular  labeled bubbles connected with lines are useless if the lines are unlabeled and unexplained  and or if every line has a different meaning instead of signifying the same relationship  unless distinguished from each other in some way    If your lines sometimes signify relationships and sometimes indicate actions and sometimes indicate the passage of time  you re really hosed   Every good programmer knows you use the tool suited for the job at hand  right   Not all systems are best specified and documented in pictures   Graphical specification languages that can be automatically turned into provably-correct  executable code or whatever are a spectacular idea  if such things exist   Use them when appropriate  not for everything under the sun   Entity-Relationship diagrams are great   But not everything can be summed up in a picture   Note  a table may be worth its weight in gold   But a table is not the same thing as a picture   And again  a well-crafted short prose paragraph may be far more suitable for the job at hand

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Use type inference anywhere and everywhere possible     Edit    Here is a link to a blog entry I wrote several months ago about why I feel this way    http   blogs msdn com jaredpar archive 2008 09 09 when-to-use-type-inference aspx

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When many new technologies appear on the scene I only learn enough about them to decide if I need them right now     If not  I put them aside until the rough edges are knocked off by  early adopters  and then check back again every few months   years

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Zealous adherence to standards stands in the way of simplicity   MVC is over-rated for websites   It s mostly just VC  sometimes M

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PHP sucks  -   The proof is in the pudding

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Opinion  Not having function definitions  and return types can lead to flexible and readable code   This opinion probably applies more to interpreted languages than compiled  Requiring a return type  and a function argument list  are great for things like intellisense to auto document your code  but they are also restrictions    Now don t get me wrong  I am not saying throw away return types  or argument lists  They have their place  And 90  of the time they are more of a benefit than a hindrance   There are times and places when this is useful

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That software can be bug free if you have the right tools and take the time to write it properly

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coding is not typing  It takes time to write the code  Most of the time in the editor window  you are just looking at the code  not actually typing  Not as often  but quite frequently  you are deleting what you have written  Or moving from one place to another  Or renaming    If you are banging away at the keyboard for a long time you are doing something wrong    Corollary  Number of lines of code written per day is not a linear measurement of a programmers productivity  as programmer that writes 100 lines in a day is quite likely a better programmer then the one that writes 20  but one that writes 5000 is certainly a bad programmer

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Stay away from Celko      http   www dbdebunk com page page 857309 htm  I think it makes a lot more sense to use surrogate primary keys then  natural  primary keys      ocdecio  Fabian Pascal gives  in chapter 3 of his book Practical issues in database management  cited in point 3 at the page that you link  as one of the criteria for choosing a key that of stability  it always exists and doesn t change   When a natural key does not possesses such property  than a surrogate key must be used  for evident reasons  to which you hint in comments   You don t know what he wrote and you have not bothered to check  otherwise you could discover that you actually agree with him  Nothing controversial there  he was saying  don t be dogmatic  adapt general guidelines to circumstances  and  above all  think  use your brain instead of a dogmatic cookbook words-of-guru approach

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Using Stored Proc is easy to maintain and less deployment vs Using ORM is OO way thus it is good  I ve heard this lot in many of my projects  when ever this statements appear it is always tough get it settled

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Developers should be able to modify production code without getting permission from anyone as long as they document their changes and notify the appropriate parties

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The only  best practice  you should be using all the time is  Use Your Brain    Too many people jumping on too many bandwagons and trying to force methods  patterns  frameworks etc onto things that don t warrant them   Just because something is new  or because someone respected has an opinion  doesn t mean it fits all     EDIT  Just to clarify - I don t think people should ignore best practices  valued opinions etc  Just that people shouldn t just blindly jump on something without thinking about WHY this  thing  is so great  IS it applicable to what I m doing  and WHAT benefits drawbacks does it bring

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The ability to create UML diagrams similar to pretzels with mad cow disease is not actually a useful software development skill   The whole point of diagramming code is to visualise connections  to see the shape of a design  But once you pass a certain rather low level of complexity  the visualisation is too much to process mentally  Making connections pictorially is only simple if you stick to straight lines  which typically makes the diagram much harder to read than if the connections were cleverly grouped and routed along the cardinal directions   Use diagrams only for broad communication purposes  and only when they re understood to be lies

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Newer languages  and managed code do not make a bad programmer better

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Any sufficiently capable library is too complicated to be useable and any library simple enough to be usable lacks that capabilities needed to be a good general solution   I run in to this constantly   Exhaustive libraries that are so complicated to use I tear my hair out and simple easy to use libraries that don t quite do what I need them to do

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According to the amount of feedback I ve gotten  my most controversial opinion  apparently  is that programmers don t always read the books they claim to have read   This is followed closely by my opinion that a programmer with a formal education is better than the same programmer who is self-taught  but not necessarily better than a different programmer who is self-taught

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Preconditions for arguments to methods functions should be part of the language rather than programmers checking it always

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Not really programming  but I can t stand css only layouts just for the sake of it   It s counter productive  frustrating  and makes maintenance a nightmare of floats and margins where changing the position of a single element can throw the entire page out of whack   It s definitely not a popular opinion  but i m done with my table layout in 20 minutes while the css gurus spend hours tweaking line-height  margins  padding and floats just to do something as basic as vertically centering a paragraph

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Opinion  Not having function definitions  and return types can lead to flexible and readable code   This opinion probably applies more to interpreted languages than compiled  Requiring a return type  and a function argument list  are great for things like intellisense to auto document your code  but they are also restrictions    Now don t get me wrong  I am not saying throw away return types  or argument lists  They have their place  And 90  of the time they are more of a benefit than a hindrance   There are times and places when this is useful

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Cowboy coders get more done   I spend my life in the startup atmosphere  Without the Cowboy coders we d waste endless cycles making sure things are done  right    As we know it s basically impossible to forsee all issues  The Cowboy coder runs head-on into these problems and is forced to solve them much more quickly than someone who tries to forsee them all   Though  if you re Cowboy coding you had better refactor that spaghetti before someone else has to maintain it     The best ones I know use continuous refactoring  They get a ton of stuff done  don t waste time trying to predict the future  and through refactoring it becomes maintainable code   Process always gets in the way of a good Cowboy  no matter how Agile it is

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Two lines of code is too many   If a method has a second line of code  it is a code smell   Refactor

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Opinion  Not having function definitions  and return types can lead to flexible and readable code   This opinion probably applies more to interpreted languages than compiled  Requiring a return type  and a function argument list  are great for things like intellisense to auto document your code  but they are also restrictions    Now don t get me wrong  I am not saying throw away return types  or argument lists  They have their place  And 90  of the time they are more of a benefit than a hindrance   There are times and places when this is useful

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Non-development staff should not be allowed to manage development staff   Correction  Staff with zero development experience should not be allowed to manage development staff

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Software Architects Designers are Overrated  As a developer  I hate the idea of Software Architects  They are basically people that no longer code full time  read magazines and articles  and then tell you how to design software  Only people that actually write software full time for a living should be doing that  I don t care if you were the worlds best coder 5 years ago before you became an Architect  your opinion is useless to me   How s that for controversial   Edit  to clarify   I think most Software Architects make great Business Analysts  talking with customers  writing requirements  tests  etc   I simply think they have no place in designing software  high level or otherwise

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Regurgitating well known sayings by programming greats out of context with the zeal of a fanatic and the misplaced assumption that they are ironclad rules really gets my goat   For example  premature optimization is the root of all evil  as covered by this thread   IMO  many technical problems and solutions are very context sensitive and the notion of global best practices is a fallacy

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You ll never use enough languages  simply because every language is the best fit for only a tiny class of problems  and it s far too difficult to mix languages   Pet examples  Java should be used only when the spec is very well thought out  because of lots of interdependencies meaning refactoring hell  and when working with concrete concepts  Perl should only be used for text processing  C should only be used when speed trumps everything  including flexibility and security  Key-value pairs should be used for one-dimensional data  CSV for two-dimensional data  XML for hierarchical data  and a DB for anything more complex

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Estimates are for me  not for you  Estimates are a useful tool for me  as development line manager  to plan what my team is working on   They are not a promise of a feature s delivery on a specific date  and they are not a stick for driving the team to work harder   IMHO if you force developers to commit to estimates you get the safest possible figure   For instance -      I think a feature will probably take me around 5 days  There s a small chance of an issue that would make it take 30 days       If the estimates are just for planning then we ll all work to 5 days  and account for the small chance of an issue should it arise       However - if meeting that estimate is required as a promise of delivery what estimate do you think gets given    If a developer s bonus or job security depends on meeting an estimate do you think they give their most accurate guess or the one they re most certain they will meet   This opinion of mine is controversial with other management  and has been interpreted as me trying to worm my way out of having proper targets  or me trying to cover up poor performance  It s a tough sell every time  but one that I ve gotten used to making

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That software can be bug free if you have the right tools and take the time to write it properly

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Developing on  NET is not programming  Its just stitching together other people s code   Having come from a coding background where you were required to know the hardware  and where this is still a vital requirements in my industry  I view high level languages as simply assembling someone else s work  Nothing essentially wrong with this  but is it  programming    MS has made a mint from doing the hard work and presenting  developers  with symbolic instruction syntax  I seem to now know more and more developers who appear constrained by the existence or non-existence of a class to perform a job   My opinion comes from the notion that to be a programmer you should be able to programme at the lowest level your platform allows  So if you re programming  NET then you need to be able to stick your head under the hood and work out the solution  rather than rely on someone else creating a class for you  That s simply lazy and does not qualify as  development  in my book

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That best practices are a hazard because they ask us to substitute slogans for thinking

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My controversial view is that the  While  construct should be removed from all programming languages    You can easily replicate While using  Repeat  and a boolean flag  and I just don t believe that it s useful to have the two structures  In fact  I think that having both  Repeat   Until  and  While  EndWhile  in a language confuses new programmers    Update - Extra Notes  One common mistake new programmers make with While is they assume that the code will break as soon as the tested condition flags false  So - If the While test flags false half way through the code  they assume a break out of the While Loop  This mistake isn t made as much with Repeat    I m actually not that bothered which of the two loops types is kept  as long as there s only one loop type  Another reason I have for choosing Repeat over While is that  While  functionality makes more sense written using  repeat  than the other way around    Second Update  I m guessing that the fact I m the only person currently running with a negative score here means this actually is a controversial opinion   Unlike the rest of you  Ha

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Modern C   is a beautiful language   There  I said it   A lot of people really hate C    but honestly  I find modern C   with STL Boost style programming to be a very expressive  elegant  and incredibly productive language most of the time     I think most people who hate C   are basing that on bad experiences with OO   C   doesn t do OO very well because polymorphism often depends on heap-allocated objects  and C   doesn t have automatic garbage collection   But C   really shines when it comes to generic libraries and functional-programming techniques which make it possible to build incredibly large  highly-maintainable systems   A lot of people say C   tries to do everything  but ends up doing nothing very well   I d probably agree that it doesn t do OO as well as other languages  but it does generic programming and functional programming better than any other mainstream C-based language    C  0x will only further underscore this truth    I also appreciate how C   lets me get low-level if necessary  and provides full access to the operating system   Plus RAII   Seriously   I really miss destructors when I program in other C-based languages    And no  garbage collection does not make destructors useless

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I don t believe that any question related to optimization should be flooded with a chant of the misquoted  Premature optimization is the root of all evil s because code that is optimized into obfuscation is what makes coding fun

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Microsoft Windows is the best platform for software development   Reasoning  Microsoft spoils its developers with excellent and cheap development tools  the platform and its API s are well documented  the platform is evolving at a rappid rate which creates a lot of opportunities for developers  The OS has a large user base which is important for obvious commercial reasons  there is a big community of Windows developers  I haven t yet been fired for choosing Microsoft

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We re software developers  not C C  C   PHP Perl Python Java     developers   After you ve been exposed to a few languages  picking up a new one and being productive with it is a small task   That is to say that you shouldn t be afraid of new languages   Of course  there is a large difference between being productive and mastering a language   But  that s no reason to shy away from a language you ve never seen   It bugs me when people say   I m a PHP developer   or when a job offer says   Java developer    After a few years experience of being a developer  new languages and APIs really shouldn t be intimidating and going from never seeing a language to being productive with it shouldn t take very long at all   I know this is controversial but it s my opinion

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If you re a developer  you should be able to write code  I did quite a bit of interviewing last year  and for my part of the interview I was supposed to test the way people thought  and how they implemented simple-to-moderate algorithms on a white board  I d initially started out with questions like      Given that Pi can be estimated using the function 4    1 - 1 3   1 5 - 1 7        with more terms giving greater accuracy  write a function that calculates Pi to an accuracy of 5 decimal places    It s a problem that should make you think  but shouldn t be out of reach to a seasoned developer  it can be answered in about 10 lines of C    However  many of our  supposedly pre-screened by the agency  candidates couldn t even begin to answer it  or even explain how they might go about answering it  So after a while I started asking simpler questions like      Given the area of a circle is given by Pi times the radius squared  write a function to calculate the area of a circle    Amazingly  more than half the candidates couldn t write this function in any language  I can read most popular languages so I let them use any language of their choice  including pseudo-code   We had  C  developers  who could not write this function in C    I was surprised by this  I had always thought that developers should be able to write code  It seems that  nowadays  this is a controversial opinion  Certainly it is amongst interview candidates     Edit   There s a lot of discussion in the comments about whether the first question is a good or bad one  and whether you should ask questions as complex as this in an interview  I m not going to delve into this here  that s a whole new question  apart from to say you re largely missing the point of the post    Yes  I said people couldn t make any headway with this  but the second question is trivial and many people couldn t make any headway with that one either  Anybody who calls themselves a developer should be able to write the answer to the second one in a few seconds without even thinking  And many can t

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What strikes me as amusing about this question is that I ve just read the first page of answers  and so far  I haven t found a single controversial opinion    Perhaps that says more about the way stackoverflow generates consensus than anything else  Maybe I should have started at the bottom   -

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You shouldn t settle on the first way you find to code something that  works    I really don t think this should be controversial  but it is   People see an example from elsewhere in the code  from online  or from some old  Teach yourself Advanced Power SQLJava BeansServer in 3 14159 minutes  book dated 1999  and they think they know something and they copy it into their code   They don t walk through the example to find out what each line does   They don t think about the design of their program and see if there might be a more organized or more natural way to do the same thing   They don t make any attempt at keeping their skill sets up to date to learn that they are using ideas and methods deprecated in the last year of the previous millenium   They don t seem to have the experience to learn that what they re copying has created specific horrific maintenance burdens for programmers for years and that they can be avoided with a little more thought   In fact  they don t even seem to recognize that there might be more than one way to do something   I come from the Perl world  where one of the slogans is  There s More Than One Way To Do It    TMTOWTDI   People who ve taken a cursory look at Perl have written it off as  write-only  or  unreadable   largely because they ve looked at crappy code written by people with the mindset I described above   Those people have given zero thought to design  maintainability  organization  reduction of duplication in code  coupling  cohesion  encapsulation  etc   They write crap   Those people exist programming in every language  and easy to learn languages with many ways to do things give them plenty of rope and guns to shoot and hang themselves with   Simultaneously   But if you hang around the Perl world for longer than a cursory look  and watch what the long-timers in the community are doing  you see a remarkable thing  the good Perl programmers spend some time seeking to find the best way to do something   When they re naming a new module  they ask around for suggestions and bounce their ideas off of people   They hand their code out to get looked at  critiqued  and modified   If they have to do something nasty  they encapsulate it in the smallest way possible in a module for use in a more organized way   Several implementations of the same idea might hang around for awhile  but they compete for mindshare and marketshare  and they compete by trying to do the best job  and a big part of that is by making themselves easily maintainable   Really good Perl programmers seem to think hard about what they are doing and looking for the best way to do things  rather than just grabbing the first idea that flits through their brain   Today I program primarily in the Java world   I ve seen some really good Java code  but I see a lot of junk as well  and I see more of the mindset I described at the beginning  people settle on the first ugly lump of code that seems to work  without understanding it  without thinking if there s a better way   You will see both mindsets in every language   I m not trying to impugn Java specifically    Actually I really like it in some ways     maybe that should be my real controversial opinion    But I m coming to believe that every programmer needs to spend a good couple of years with a TMTOWTDI-style language  because even though conventional wisdom has it that this leads to chaos and crappy code  it actually seems to produce people who understand that you need to think about the repercussions of what you are doing instead of trusting your language to have been designed to make you do the right thing with no effort   I do think you can err too far in the other direction  i e   perfectionism that totally ignores your true needs and goals  often the true needs and goals of your business  which is usually profitability    But I don t think anyone can be a truly great programmer without learning to invest some greater-than-average effort in thinking about finding the best  or at least one of the best  way to code what they are doing

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QA can be done well  over the long haul  without exploring all forms of testing Lots of places seem to have an  quot approach quot   how  quot we do it quot   This seems to implicitly exclude other approaches  This is a serious problem over the long term  because the primary function of QA is to file bugs -and- get them fixed  You cannot do this well if you are not finding as many bugs as possible  When you exclude methodologies  for example  by being too black-box dependent  you start to ignore entire classes of discoverable coding errors  That means  by implication  you are making entire classes of coding errors unfixable  except when someone else stumbles on it  The underlying problem often seems to be management   staff  Managers with this problem seem to have narrow thinking about the computer science and or the value proposition of their team  They tend to create teams that reflect their approach  and a whitelist of testing methods  I am not saying you can or should do everything all the time  Lets face it  some test methods are simply going to be a waste of time for a given product  And some methodologies are more useful at certain levels of product maturity  But what I think is missing is the ability of testing organizations to challenge themselves to learn new things  and apply that to their overall performance  Here s a hypothetical conversation that would sum it up   Me  You tested that startup script for 10 years  and you managed to learn NOTHING about shell scripts and how they work   Tester  Yes  Me  Permissions  Tester  The installer does that Me  Platform  release-specific dependencies  Tester  We file bugs for that Me  Error handling  Tester  when errors happen to customer support sends us some info  Me  Okay    starts thinking about writing post in stackoverflow

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I m probably gonna get roasted for this  but   Making invisible characters syntactically significant in python was a bad idea  It s distracting  causes lots of subtle bugs for novices and  in my opinion  wasn t really needed  About the only code I ve ever seen that didn t voluntarily follow some sort of decent formatting guide was from first-year CS students  And even if code doesn t follow  nice  standards  there are plenty of tools out there to coerce it into a more pleasing shape

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I generally hold pretty controversial  strong and loud opinions  so here s just a couple of them    Because we re a Microsoft outfit partner specialist  is never a valid argument   The company I m working in now identifies itself  first and foremost  as a Microsoft specialist  So the aforementioned argument gets thrown around quite a bit  and I ve yet to see a context where it s valid   I can t see why it s a reason to promote Microsoft s technology and products in every applicable corner  overriding customer and employee satisfaction  and general pragmatics   This just a cornerstone of my deep hatred towards politics in software business   MOSS  Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server  is a piece of shit   Kinda echoes the first opinion  but I honestly think MOSS  as it is  should be shot out of the market  It costs gazillions to license and set up  pukes on web standards and makes developers generally pretty unhappy  I have yet to see a MOSS project that has an overall positive outcome   Yet time after time  a customer approaches us and asks for a MOSS solution

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Hardcoding is good   Really  more efficient and much easier to maintain in many cases   The number of times I ve seen constants put into parameter files really how often will you change the freezing point of water or the speed of light   For C programs just hard code these type of values into a header file  for java into a static class etc   When these parameters have a drastic effect on your programs behaviour you really want to do a regresion test on every change  this seems more natural with hard coded values  When things are stored in parameter property files the temptation is to think  this is not a program cahnge so I dont need to test it    The other advantage is it stops people messing with vital values in the parameter property files because there aren t any

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I hate universities and institutes offering short courses for teaching programming to new comers  It is outright disgrace and contempt for the art1 and science of programming    They start teaching C  Java  VB  disgusting  to the people without good grasp on hardware and fundamental principals of computers  The should first be taught about the MACHINE by books like Morris Mano s Computer System Architecture and then taught the concept of instructing machine to solve problems instead of etching semantics and syntax of one programming language   Also I don t understand government schools  colleges teaching children basics of computers using commercial operating systems and softwares  At least in my country  India  not many students afford to buy operating systems and even discounted office suits let alone the development software  juggernaut  compilers  IDEs etc   This prompts theft and piracy and make this act of copying and stealing software from their institutes  libraries a justified act   Again they are taught to use some products not the fundamental ideas   Think about it if you were taught only that 2x2 is 4 and not the concept of multiplication   Or if you were taught now to measure the length of pole inclined to some compound wall of your school but not the Pythagoras theorem

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I often get shouted down when I claim that the code is merely an expression of my design   I quite dislike the way I see so many developers design their system  on the fly  while coding it   The amount of time and effort wasted when one of these cowboys falls off his horse is amazing - and 9 times out of 10 the problem they hit would have been uncovered with just a little upfront design work   I feel that modern methodologies do not emphasize the importance of design in the overall software development process   Eg  the importance placed on code reviews when you haven t even reviewed your design   It s madness

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Every developer should spend several weeks  or even months  developing paper-based systems before they start building electronic ones  They should also then be forced to use their systems   Developing a good paper-based system is hard work  It forces you to take into account human nature  cumbersome processes get ignored  ones that are too complex tend to break down   and teaches you to appreciate the value of simplicity  new work goes in this tray  work for QA goes in this tray  archiving goes in this box    Once you ve worked out how to build a system on paper  it s often a lot easier to build an effective computer system - one that people will actually want to  and be able to  use   The systems we develop are not manned by an army of perfectly-trained automata  real people use them  real people who are trained by managers who are also real people and have far too little time to waste training them how to jump through your hoops   In fact  for my second point   Every developer should be required to run an interactive training course to show users how to use their software

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Opinion  Unit tests don t need to be written up front  and sometimes not at all   Reasoning  Developers suck at testing their own code  We do  That s why we generally have test teams or QA groups   Most of the time the code we write is to intertwined with other code to be tested separately  so we end up jumping through patterned hoops to provide testability  Not that those patterns are bad  but they can sometimes add unnecessary complexity  all for the sake of unit testing         which often doesn t work anyway  To write a comprehensive unit test requires alot of time  Often more time than we re willing to give  And the more comprehensive the test  the more brittle it becomes if the interface of the thing it s testing changes  forcing a rewrite of a test that no longer compiles

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One class per file  Who cares  I much prefer entire programs contained in one file rather than a million different files

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Web services absolutely suck  and are not the way of the future   They are ridiculously inefficient and they don t guarantee ordered delivery   Web services should NEVER be used within a system where both client and server are being written   They are mostly useful for micky mouse mash-up type applications   They should definitely not be used for any kind of connection-oriented communication   This stance has gotten myself and colleagues into some very heated discussions  since web services is such a buzzy topic   Any project that mandates the use of web services is doomed because it is clearly already having ridiculous demands pushed down from management

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Although I m in full favor of Test-Driven Development  TDD   I think there s a vital step before developers even start the full development cycle of prototyping a solution to the problem   We too often get caught up trying to follow our TDD practices for a solution that may be misdirected because we don t know the domain well enough  Simple prototypes can often elucidate these problems   Prototypes are great because you can quickly churn through and throw away more code than when you re writing tests first  sometimes   You can then begin the development process with a blank slate but a better understanding

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I often get shouted down when I claim that the code is merely an expression of my design   I quite dislike the way I see so many developers design their system  on the fly  while coding it   The amount of time and effort wasted when one of these cowboys falls off his horse is amazing - and 9 times out of 10 the problem they hit would have been uncovered with just a little upfront design work   I feel that modern methodologies do not emphasize the importance of design in the overall software development process   Eg  the importance placed on code reviews when you haven t even reviewed your design   It s madness

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Functional programming is NOT more intuitive or easier to learn than imperative programming   There are many good things about functional programming  but I often hear functional programmers say it s easier to understand functional programming than imperative programming for people with no programming experience  From what I ve seen it s the opposite  people find trivial problems hard to solve because they don t get how to manage and reuse their temporary results when you end up in a world without state

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Manually halting a program is an effective  proven way to find performance problems   Believable  Not to most  True  Absolutely   Programmers are far more judgmental than necessary   Witness all the things considered  evil  or  horrible  in these posts   Programmers are data-structure-happy   Witness all the discussions of classes  inheritance  private-vs-public  memory management  etc   versus how to analyze requirements

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Print statements are a valid way to debug code  I believe it is perfectly fine to debug your code by littering it with System out println  or whatever print statement works for your language    Often  this can be quicker than debugging  and you can compare printed outputs against other runs of the app   Just make sure to remove the print statements when you go to production  or better  turn them into logging statements

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Most comments in code are in fact a pernicious form of code duplication   We spend most of our time maintaining code written by others  or ourselves  and poor  incorrect  outdated  misleading comments must be near the top of the list of most annoying artifacts in code   I think eventually many people just blank them out  especially those flowerbox monstrosities   Much better to concentrate on making the code readable  refactoring as necessary  and minimising idioms and quirkiness   On the other hand  many courses teach that comments are very nearly more important than the code itself  leading to the this next line adds one to invoiceTotal style of commenting

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Although I m in full favor of Test-Driven Development  TDD   I think there s a vital step before developers even start the full development cycle of prototyping a solution to the problem   We too often get caught up trying to follow our TDD practices for a solution that may be misdirected because we don t know the domain well enough  Simple prototypes can often elucidate these problems   Prototypes are great because you can quickly churn through and throw away more code than when you re writing tests first  sometimes   You can then begin the development process with a blank slate but a better understanding

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Sometimes it s appropriate to swallow an exception   For UI bells and wistles  prompting the user with an error message is interuptive  and there is ussually nothing for them to do anyway   In this case  I just log it  and deal with it when it shows up in the logs

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Neither Visual Basic or C  trumps the other   They are pretty much the same  save some syntax and formatting

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A random collection of Cook s aphorisms      The hardest language to learn is your second  The hardest OS to learn is your second one - especially if your first was an IBM mainframe  Once you ve learned several seemingly different languages  you finally realize that all programming languages are the same - just minor differences in syntax  Although one can be quite productive and marketable without having learned any assembly  no one will ever have a visceral understanding of computing without it  Debuggers are the final refuge for programmers who don t really know what they re doing in the first place  No OS will ever be stable if it doesn t make use of hardware memory management  Low level systems programming is much  much easier than applications programming  The programmer who has a favorite language is just playing  Write the User s Guide FIRST  Policy and procedure are intended for those who lack the initiative to perform otherwise   The Contractor s Creed   Tell em what they need  Give em what they want  Make sure the check clears  If you don t find programming fun  get out of it or accept that although you may make a living at it  you ll never be more than average  Just as the old farts have to learn the  NET method names  you ll have to learn the library calls   But there s nothing new there  The life of a programmer is one of constantly adapting to different environments  and the more tools you have hung on your belt  the more versatile and marketable you ll be  You may piddle around a bit with little code chunks near the beginning to try out some ideas  but  in general  one doesn t start coding in earnest until you KNOW how the whole program or app is going to be layed out  and you KNOW that the whole thing is going to work EXACTLY as advertised   For most projects with at least some degree of complexity  I generally end up spending 60 to 70 percent of the time up front just percolating ideas  Understand that programming has little to do with language and everything to do with algorithm  All of those nifty geegaws with memorable acronyms that folks have come up with over the years are just different ways of skinning the implementation cat   When you strip away all the OOPiness  RADology  Development Methodology 37  and Best Practice 42  you still have to deal with the basic building blocks of    assignments conditionals iterations control flow I O    Once you can truly wrap yourself around that  you ll eventually get to the point where you see  from a programming standpoint  little difference between writing an inventory app for an auto parts company  a graphical real-time TCP performance analyzer  a mathematical model of a stellar core  or an appointments calendar    Beginning programmers work with small chunks of code   As they gain experience  they work with ever increasingly large chunks of code  As they gain even more experience  they work with small chunks of code

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If you want to write good software then step away from your computer  Go and hang out with the end users and the people who want and need the software  Only from them will you understand what your software needs to accomplish and how it needs to do that     Ask them what the love  amp  hate about the existing processes   Ask them about the future of their processes  where it is headed  Hang out and see what they use now and figure out their usage patterns  You need to meet and match their usage expectations  See what else they use a lot  particularly if they like it and can use it efficiently  Match that    The end user doesn t give a rat s how elegant your code is or what language it s in  If it works for them and they like using it  you win  If it doesn t make their lives easier and better - they hate it  you lose   Walk a mile in their shoes - then go write your code

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Automatic Updates Lead to Poorer Quality Software that is Less Secure  The Idea  A system to keep users  software up to date with the latest bug fixes and security patches   The Reality  Products have to be shipped by fixed deadlines  often at the expense of QA  Software is then released with many bugs and security holes in order to meet the deadline in the knowledge that the  Automatic Update  can be used to fix all the problems later   Now  the piece of software that really made me think of this is VS2K5  At first  it was great  but as the updates were installed the software is slowly getting worse  The biggest offence was the loss of macros - I had spent a long time creating a set of useful VBA macros to automate some of the code I write - but apparently there was a security hole and instead of fixing it the macro system was disabled  Bang goes a really useful feature  recording keystrokes and repeated replaying of them   Now  if I were really paranoid  I could see Automatic Updates as a way to get people to upgrade their software by slowly installing code that breaks the system more often  As the system becomes more unreliable  users are tempted to pay out for the next version with the promise of better reliablity and so on   Skizz

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The class library guidelines for implementing IDisposable are wrong   I don t share this too often  but I believe that the guidance for the default implementation for IDisposable is completely wrong   My issue isn t with the overload of Dispose and then removing the item from finalization  but rather  I despise how there is a call to release the managed resources in the finalizer   I personally believe that an exception should be thrown  and yes  with all the nastiness that comes from throwing it on the finalizer thread    The reasoning behind it is that if you are a client or server of IDisposable  there is an understanding that you can t simply leave the object lying around to be finalized   If you do  this is a design implementation flaw  depending on how it is left lying around  and or how it is exposed   as you are not aware of the lifetime of instances that you should be aware of   I think that this type of bug error is on the level of race conditions synchronization to resources   Unfortunately  with calling the overload of Dispose  that error is never materialized   Edit   I ve written a blog post on the subject if anyone is interested   http   www caspershouse com post A-Better-Implementation-Pattern-for-IDisposable aspx

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Unit Testing won t help you write good code  The only reason to have Unit tests is to make sure that code that already works doesn t break   Writing tests first  or writing code to the tests is ridiculous   If you write to the tests before the code  you won t even know what the edge cases are  You could have code that passes the tests but still fails in unforeseen circumstances   And furthermore  good developers will keep cohesion low  which will make the addition of new code unlikely to cause problems with existing stuff   In fact  I ll generalize that even further    Most  Best Practices  in Software Engineering are there to keep bad programmers from doing too much damage    They re there to hand-hold bad developers and keep them from making dumbass mistakes  Of course  since most developers are bad  this is a good thing  but good developers should get a pass

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Developing on  NET is not programming  Its just stitching together other people s code   Having come from a coding background where you were required to know the hardware  and where this is still a vital requirements in my industry  I view high level languages as simply assembling someone else s work  Nothing essentially wrong with this  but is it  programming    MS has made a mint from doing the hard work and presenting  developers  with symbolic instruction syntax  I seem to now know more and more developers who appear constrained by the existence or non-existence of a class to perform a job   My opinion comes from the notion that to be a programmer you should be able to programme at the lowest level your platform allows  So if you re programming  NET then you need to be able to stick your head under the hood and work out the solution  rather than rely on someone else creating a class for you  That s simply lazy and does not qualify as  development  in my book

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Debuggers should be forbidden  This would force people to write code that is testable through unit tests  and in the end would lead to much better code quality   Remove Copy  amp  Paste from ALL programming IDEs  Copy  amp  pasted code is very bad  this option should be completely removed  Then the programmer will hopefully be too lazy to retype all the code so he makes a function and reuses the code   Whenever you use a Singleton  slap yourself  Singletons are almost never necessary  and are most of the time just a fancy name for a global variable

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Source Control  Anything But SourceSafe  Also  Exclusive locking is evil   I once worked somewhere where they argued that exclusive locks meant that you were guaranteeing that people were not overwriting someone else s changes when you checked in  The problem was that in order to get any work done  if a file was locked devs would just change their local file to writable and merging  or overwriting  the source control with their version when they had the chance

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The worst thing about recursion is recursion

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Controversial to self  because some things are better be left unsaid  so you won t be painted by others as too egotist   However  here it is   If it is to be  it begins with me

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I think that using regions in C  is totally acceptable to collapse your code while in VS  Too many people try to say it hides your code and makes it hard to find things  But if you use them properly they can be very helpful to identify sections of code

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Member variables should never be declared private  in java      If you declare something private  you prevent any future developer from deriving from your class and extending the functionality   Essentially  by writing  private  you are implying that you know more now about how your class can be used than any future developer might ever know      Whenever you write  private   you ought to write  protected  instead   Classes should never be declared final  in java   Similarly  if you declare a class as final  which prevents it from being extended -- prevents it from being used as a base class for inheritance   you are implying that you know more than any future programmer might know  about what is the right and proper way to use your class    This never a good idea   You don t know everything   Someone might come up with a perfectly suitable way to extend your class that you didn t think of   Java Beans are a terrible idea   The java bean convention -- declaring all members as private and then writing  get   and set   methods for every member -- forces programmers to write boilerplate  error-prone  tedious  and lengthy code  where no code is needed    Just make public members variables public   Trust in your ability to change it later  if you need to change the implementation  hint  99  of the time  you never will

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Using Stored Procedures  Unless you are writing a large procedural function composed of non-reusable SQL queries  please move your stored procedures of the database and into version control

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Don t use inheritance unless you can explain why you need it

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Opinion  Duration in the development field does not always mean the same as experience   Many trades look at  years of experience  in a language   Yes  5 years of C  can make sense since you may learn new tricks and what not  However  if you are with the company and maintaining the same code base for a number of years  I feel as if you are not gaining the amount of exposure to different situations as a person who works on different situations and client needs     I once interviewed a person who prided himself on having 10 years of programming experience and worked with VB5  6  and VB Net   all in the same company during that time   After more probing  I found out that while he worked with all of those versions of VB  he was only upgrading and constantly maintaining his original VB5 app   Never modified the architecture and let the upgrade wizards do their thing   I have interviewed people who only have 2 years in the field but have worked on multiple projects that have more  experience  than him

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I work in ASP NET   VB NET a lot and find ViewState an absolute nightmare   It s enabled by default on the majority of fields and causes a large quantity of encoded data at the start of every web page   The bigger a page gets in terms of controls on a page  the larger the ViewState data will become   Most people don t turn an eye to it  but it creates a large set of data which is usually irrelevant to the tasks being carried on the page   You must manually disable this option on all ASP controls if they re not being used   It s either that or have custom controls for everything   On some pages I work with  half of the page is made up of ViewState  which is a shame really as there s probably better ways of doing it   That s just one small example I can think of in terms of language technology opinions   It may be controversial   By the way  you might want to edit voting on this thread  it could get quite heated by some

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Tcl Tk is the best GUI language toolkit combo ever  It may lack specific widgets and be less good-looking than the new kids on the block  but its model is elegant and so easy to use that one can build working GUIs faster by typing commands interactively than by using a visual interface builder  Its expressive power is unbeatable  other solutions  Gtk  Java   NET  MFC     typically require ten to one hundred LOC to get the same result as a Tcl Tk one-liner  All without even sacrificing readability or stability   pack  label  l -text  Hello world     button  b -text  Quit  -command exit

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Globals and or Singletons are not inherently evil  I come from more of a sysadmin  shell  Perl  and my  real  programming   PHP type background  last year I was thrown into a Java development gig   Singletons are evil  Globals are so evil they are not even allowed  Yet  Java has things like AOP  and now various  Dependency Injection  frameworks  we used Google Guice   AOP less so  but DI things for sure give you what  Globals  Uhh  thanks

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That most language proponents make a lot of noise

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As there are hundreds of answers to this mine will probably end up unread  but here s my pet peeve anyway   If you re a programmer then you re most likely awful at Web Design Development  This website is a phenomenal resource for programmers  but an absolutely awful place to come if you re looking for XHTML CSS help  Even the good Web Developers here are handing out links to resources that were good in the 90 s   Sure  XHTML and CSS are simple to learn  However  you re not just learning a language  You re learning how to use it well  and very few designers and developers can do that  let alone programmers  It took me ages to become a capable designer and even longer to become a good developer  I could code in HTML from the age of 10 but that didn t mean I was good  Now I am a capable designer in programs like Photoshop and Illustrator  I am perfectly able to write a good website in Notepad and am able to write basic scripts in several languages  Not only that but I have a good nose for Search Engine Optimisation techniques and can easily tell you where the majority of people are going wrong  hint  get some good content      Also  this place is a terrible resource for advice on web standards  You should NOT just write code to work in the different browsers  You should ALWAYS follow the standard to future-proof your code  More often than not the fixes you use on your websites will break when the next browser update comes along  Not only that but the good browsers follow standards anyway  Finally  the reason IE was allowed to ruin the Internet was because YOU allowed it by coding your websites for IE  If you re going to continue to do that for Firefox then we ll lose out yet again   If you think that table-based layouts are as good  if not better than CSS layouts then you should not be allowed to talk on the subject  at least without me shooting you down first  Also  if you think W3Schools is the best resource to send someone to then you re just plain wrong   If you re new to Web Design Development don t bother with this place  it s full of programmers  not web developers   Go to a good Web Design Development community like SitePoint

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The best programmers trace all their code in the debugger and test all paths   Well    the OP said controversial

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Design patterns are a waste of time when it comes to software design and development   Don t get me wrong  design patterns are useful but mainly as a communication vector  They can express complex ideas very concisely  factory  singleton  iterator     But they shouldn t serve as a development method  Too often developers architect their code using a flurry of design pattern-based classes where a more concise design would be better  both in term of readability and performance  All that with the illusion that individual classes could be reused outside their domain  If a class is not designed for reuse or isn t part of the interface  then it s an implementation detail   Design patterns should be used to put names on organizational features  not to dictate the way code must be written    It was supposed to be controversial  remember

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That most language proponents make a lot of noise

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Getting paid to program is generally one of the worst uses of a man s time   For one thing  you re in competition with the Elbonians  who work for a quarter a day  You need to convince your employer that you offer something the Elbonians never can  and that your something is worth a livable salary  As the Elbonians get more and more overseas business  the real advantage wears thin  and management knows it   For another thing  you re spending time solving someone else s problems  That s time you could spend advancing your own interests  or working on problems that actually interest you  And if you think you re saving the world by working on the problems of other men  then why don t you just get the Elbonians to do it for you   Last  the great innovations in software  visicalc  Napster  Pascal  etc  were not created by cubicle farms  They were created by one or two people without advance pay  You can t forcibly recreate that  It s just magic that sometimes happens when a competent programmer has a really good idea   There is enough software  There are enough software developers  You don t have to be one for hire  Save your talents  your time  your hair  your marriage  Let someone else sell his soul to the keyboard  If you want to program  fine  But don t do it for the money

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Copy Pasting is not an antipattern  it fact it helps with not making more bugs  My rule of thumb - typing only something that cannot be copy pasted  If creating similar method  class  or file - copy existing one and change what s needed   I am not talking about duplicating a code that should have been put into a single method    I usually never even type variable names - either copy pasting them or using IDE autocompletion  If need some DAO method - copying similar one and changing what s needed  even if 90  will be changed   May look like extreme laziness or lack of knowledge to some  but I almost never have to deal with problems caused my misspelling something trivial  and they are usually tough to catch  if not detected on a compile level     Whenever I step away from my copy-pasting rule and start typing stuff I always misspelling something  it s just a statistics  nobody can write perfect text off the bat  and then spending more time trying to figure out where

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Only write an abstraction if it s going to save 3X as much time later   I see people write all these crazy abstractions sometimes and I think to myself   Why    Unless an abstraction is really going to save you time later or it s going to save the person maintaining your code time  it seems people are just writing spaghetti code more and more

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Member variables should never be declared private  in java      If you declare something private  you prevent any future developer from deriving from your class and extending the functionality   Essentially  by writing  private  you are implying that you know more now about how your class can be used than any future developer might ever know      Whenever you write  private   you ought to write  protected  instead   Classes should never be declared final  in java   Similarly  if you declare a class as final  which prevents it from being extended -- prevents it from being used as a base class for inheritance   you are implying that you know more than any future programmer might know  about what is the right and proper way to use your class    This never a good idea   You don t know everything   Someone might come up with a perfectly suitable way to extend your class that you didn t think of   Java Beans are a terrible idea   The java bean convention -- declaring all members as private and then writing  get   and set   methods for every member -- forces programmers to write boilerplate  error-prone  tedious  and lengthy code  where no code is needed    Just make public members variables public   Trust in your ability to change it later  if you need to change the implementation  hint  99  of the time  you never will

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Development is 80  about the design and 20  about coding  I believe that developers should spend 80  of time designing at the fine level of detail  what they are going to build and only 20  actually coding what they ve designed  This will produce code with near zero bugs and save a lot on test-fix-retest cycle   Getting to the metal  or IDE  early is like premature optimization  which is know to be a root of all evil  Thoughtful upfront design  I m not necessarily talking about enormous design document  simple drawings on white board will work as well  will yield much better results than just coding and fixing

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I can live without closures   Looks like nowadays everyone and their mother want closures to be present in a language because it is the greatest invention since sliced bread  And I think it is just another hype

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The customer is not always right   In most cases that I deal with  the customer is the product owner  aka  the business    All too often  developers just code and do not try to provide a vested stake in the product   There is too much of a misconception that the IT Department is a  company within a company   which is a load of utter garbage   I feel my role is that of helping the business express their ideas - with the mutual understanding that I take an interest in understanding the business so that I can provide the best experience possible   And that route implies that there will be times that the product owner asks for something that he she feels is the next revolution in computing leaving someone to either agree with that fact  or explain the more likely reason of why no one does something a certain way   It is mutually beneficial  because the product owner understands the thought that goes into the product  and the development team understands that they do more than sling code   This has actually started to lead us down the path of increased productivity   How   Since the communication has improved due to disagreements on both sides of the table  it is more likely that we come together earlier in the process and come to a mutually beneficial solution to the product definition

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It s a good idea to keep optimisation in mind when developing code   Whenever I say this  people always reply   premature optimisation is the root of all evil    But I m not saying optimise before you debug   I m not even saying optimise ever  but when you re designing code  bear in mind the possibility that this might become a bottleneck  and write it so that it will be possible to refactor it for speed  without tearing the API apart   Hugo

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Lazy Programmers are the Best Programmers  A lazy programmer most often finds ways to decrease the amount of time spent writing code  especially a lot of similar or repeating code   This often translates into tools and workflows that other developers in the company team can benefit from   As the developer encounters similar projects he may create tools to bootstrap the development process  e g  creating a DRM layer that works with the company s database design paradigms    Furthermore  developers such as these often use some form of code generation  This means all bugs of the same type  for example  the code generator did not check for null parameters on all methods  can often be fixed by fixing the generator and not the 50  instances of that bug   A lazy programmer may take a few more hours to get the first product out the door  but will save you months down the line

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The only  best practice  you should be using all the time is  Use Your Brain    Too many people jumping on too many bandwagons and trying to force methods  patterns  frameworks etc onto things that don t warrant them   Just because something is new  or because someone respected has an opinion  doesn t mean it fits all     EDIT  Just to clarify - I don t think people should ignore best practices  valued opinions etc  Just that people shouldn t just blindly jump on something without thinking about WHY this  thing  is so great  IS it applicable to what I m doing  and WHAT benefits drawbacks does it bring

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switch-case is not object oriented programming   I often see a lot of switch-case or awful big if-else constructs  This is merely a sign for not putting state where it belongs and don t use the real and efficient switch-case construct that is already there  method lookup vtable

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UML diagrams are highly overrated  Of course there are useful diagrams e g  class diagram for the Composite Pattern  but many UML diagrams have absolutely no value

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Dependency Management Software Does More Harm Than Good  I ve worked on Java projects that included upwards of a hundred different libraries  In most cases  each library has its own dependencies  and those dependent libraries have their own dependencies too   Software like Maven or Ivy supposedly  manage  this problem by automatically fetching the correct version of each library and then recursively fetching all of its dependencies   Problem solved  right   Wrong   Downloading libraries is the easy part of dependency management  The hard part is creating a mental model of the software  and how it interacts with all those libraries   My unpopular opinion is this   If you can t verbally explain  off the top of your head  the basic interactions between all the libraries in your project  you should eliminate dependencies until you can   Along the same lines  if it takes you longer than ten seconds to list all of the libraries  and their methods  invoked either directly or indirectly from one of your functions  then you are doing a poor job of managing dependencies   You should be able to easily answer the question  which parts of my application actually depend on library XYZ    The current crop of dependency management tools do more harm than good  because they make it easy to create impossibly-complicated dependency graphs  and they provide virtually no functionality for reducing dependencies or identifying problems   I ve seen developers include 10 or 20 MB worth of libraries  introducing thousands of dependent classes into the project  just to eliminate a few dozen lines of simple custom code   Using libraries and frameworks can be good  But there s always a cost  and tools which obscure that cost are inherently problematic   Moreover  it s sometimes  note  certainly not always  better to reinvent the wheel by writing a few small classes that implement exactly what you need than to introduce a dependency on a large general-purpose library

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Automatic Updates Lead to Poorer Quality Software that is Less Secure  The Idea  A system to keep users  software up to date with the latest bug fixes and security patches   The Reality  Products have to be shipped by fixed deadlines  often at the expense of QA  Software is then released with many bugs and security holes in order to meet the deadline in the knowledge that the  Automatic Update  can be used to fix all the problems later   Now  the piece of software that really made me think of this is VS2K5  At first  it was great  but as the updates were installed the software is slowly getting worse  The biggest offence was the loss of macros - I had spent a long time creating a set of useful VBA macros to automate some of the code I write - but apparently there was a security hole and instead of fixing it the macro system was disabled  Bang goes a really useful feature  recording keystrokes and repeated replaying of them   Now  if I were really paranoid  I could see Automatic Updates as a way to get people to upgrade their software by slowly installing code that breaks the system more often  As the system becomes more unreliable  users are tempted to pay out for the next version with the promise of better reliablity and so on   Skizz

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There is no  one size fits all  approach to development  I m surprised that this is a controversial opinion  because it seems to me like common sense  However  there are many entries on popular blogs promoting the  one size fits all  approach to development so I think I may actually be in the minority   Things I ve seen being touted as the correct approach for any project - before any information is known about it - are things like the use of Test Driven Development  TDD   Domain Driven Design  DDD   Object-Relational Mapping  ORM   Agile  capital A   Object Orientation  OO   etc  etc  encompassing everything from methodologies to architectures to components  All with nice marketable acronyms  of course   People even seem to go as far as putting badges on their blogs such as  I m Test Driven  or similar  as if their strict adherence to a single approach whatever the details of the project project is actually a good thing    It isn t    Choosing the correct methodologies and architectures and components  etc   is something that should be done on a per-project basis  and depends not only on the type of project you re working on and its unique requirements  but also the size and ability of the team you re working with

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else  is harmful

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I believe that the  Let s Rewrite The Past And Try To Fix That Bug Pretending Nothing Ever Worked  is a valuable debugging mantra in desperate situations   https   stackoverflow com questions 978904 do-you-use-the-orwellian-past-rewriting-debugging-philosophy-closed

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There is only one design pattern  encapsulation  For example    Factory method  you ve encapsulated object creation Strategy  you encapsulated different changeable algorithms Iterator  you encapsulated the way to sequentially access the elements in the collection

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This one is mostly web related but     Use Tables for your web page layouts  If I was developing a gigantic site that needed to squeeze performance I might think about it  but nothing gives me an easier way to get a consistent look out on the browser than tables  The majority of applications that I develop are for around 100-1000 users and possible 100 at a time max   The extra bloat of the tables aren t killing my server by any means

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Architects that do not code are useless   That sounds a little harsh  but it s not unreasonable  If you are the  architect  for a system  but do not have some amount of hands-on involvement with the technologies employed then how do you get the respect of the development team  How do you influence direction   Architects need to do a lot more  meet with stakeholders  negotiate with other teams  evaluate vendors  write documentation  give presentations  etc   But  if you never see code checked in from by your architect    be wary

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The latest design patterns tend to be so much snake oil   As has been said previously in this question  overuse of design patterns can harm a design much more than help it     If I hear one more person saying that  everyone should be using IOC   or some similar pile of turd   I think I ll be forced to hunt them down and teach them the error of their ways

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Sometimes you have to denormalize your databases   An opinion that doesn t go well with most programmers but you have to sacrifice things like noramlization for performance sometimes

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C   is future killer language         of dynamic languages   nobody owns it  has a growing set of features like compile-time  meta- programming or type inference  callbacks without the overhead of function calls  doesn t enforce a single approach  multi-paradigm    POSIX and ECMAScript regular expressions   multiple return values   you can have named arguments   etc etc   things move really slowly in programming   it took JavaScript 10 years to get off the ground  mostly because of performance   and most of people who program in it still don t get it  classes in JS  c mon     i d say C   will really start shining in 15-20 years from now   that seems to me like about the right amount of time for C    the language as well as compiler vendors  and critical mass of programmers who today write in dynamic languages to converge   C   needs to become more programmer-friendly  compiler errors generated from templates or compile times in the presence of same   and the programmers need to realize that static typing is a boon  it s already in progress  see other answer here which asserts that good code written in a dynamically typed language is written as if the language was statically typed

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It s not the tools  it s you  Whenever developers try to do something new like doing UML diagrams  charts of any sort  project management they first look for the perfect tool to solve the problem  After endless searches finding not the right tool their motivation starves  All that is left then is complaints about the lack of useable software  It is the insight that the plan to be organized died in absence of a piece of software   Well  it is only yourself dealing with organization  If you are used to organize you can do it with or without the aid of a software  and most do without   If you are not used to organize nobody can help you   So  not having the right software  is just the simplest excuse for not being organized at all

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Globals and or Singletons are not inherently evil  I come from more of a sysadmin  shell  Perl  and my  real  programming   PHP type background  last year I was thrown into a Java development gig   Singletons are evil  Globals are so evil they are not even allowed  Yet  Java has things like AOP  and now various  Dependency Injection  frameworks  we used Google Guice   AOP less so  but DI things for sure give you what  Globals  Uhh  thanks

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I hate universities and institutes offering short courses for teaching programming to new comers  It is outright disgrace and contempt for the art1 and science of programming    They start teaching C  Java  VB  disgusting  to the people without good grasp on hardware and fundamental principals of computers  The should first be taught about the MACHINE by books like Morris Mano s Computer System Architecture and then taught the concept of instructing machine to solve problems instead of etching semantics and syntax of one programming language   Also I don t understand government schools  colleges teaching children basics of computers using commercial operating systems and softwares  At least in my country  India  not many students afford to buy operating systems and even discounted office suits let alone the development software  juggernaut  compilers  IDEs etc   This prompts theft and piracy and make this act of copying and stealing software from their institutes  libraries a justified act   Again they are taught to use some products not the fundamental ideas   Think about it if you were taught only that 2x2 is 4 and not the concept of multiplication   Or if you were taught now to measure the length of pole inclined to some compound wall of your school but not the Pythagoras theorem

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Exceptions should only be used in truly exceptional cases  It seems like the use of exceptions has run rampant on the projects I ve worked on recently   Here s an example   We have filters that intercept web requests   The filter calls a screener  and the screener s job is to check to see if the request has certain input parameters and validate the parameters   You set the fields to check for  and the abstract class makes sure the parameters are not blank  then calls a screen   method implemented by your particular class to do more extended validation   public boolean processScreener HttpServletRequest req  HttpServletResponse resp  FilterConfig filterConfig  throws Exception                                         if   checkFieldExistence req                        return false                            return screen req resp filterConfig           That checkFieldExistance req  method never returns false   It returns true if none of the fields are missing  and throws an exception if a field is missing   I know that this is bad design  but part of the problem is that some architects here believe that you need to throw an exception every time you hit something unexpected   Also  I am aware that the signature of checkFieldExistance req  does throw an Exception  its just that almost all of our methods do - so it didn t occur to me that the method might throw an exception instead of returning false   Only until I dug through the code I noticed it

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It s not the tools  it s you  Whenever developers try to do something new like doing UML diagrams  charts of any sort  project management they first look for the perfect tool to solve the problem  After endless searches finding not the right tool their motivation starves  All that is left then is complaints about the lack of useable software  It is the insight that the plan to be organized died in absence of a piece of software   Well  it is only yourself dealing with organization  If you are used to organize you can do it with or without the aid of a software  and most do without   If you are not used to organize nobody can help you   So  not having the right software  is just the simplest excuse for not being organized at all

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Nobody Cares About Your Code  If you don t work on a government security clearance project and you re not in finance  odds are nobody cares what you re working on outside of your company customer base   No one s sniffing packets or trying to hack into your machine to read your source code   This doesn t mean we should be flippant about security  because there are certainly a number of people who just want to wreak general havoc and destroy your hard work  or access stored information your company may have such as credit card data or identity data in bulk   However  I think people are overly concerned about other people getting access to your source code and taking your ideas

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Relational databases are awful for web applications   For example    threaded comments tag clouds user search maintaining record view counts providing undo   revision tracking multi-step wizards

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I d say that my most controversial opinion on programming is that I honestly believe you shouldn t worry so much about throw-away code and rewriting code   Too many times people feel that if you write something down  then changing it means you did something wrong    But the way my brain works is to get something very simple working  and update the code slowly  while ensuring that the code and the test continue to function together   It may end up actually creating classes  methods  additional parameters  etc   I fully well know will go away in a few hours   But I do it because i want to take only small steps toward my goal   In the end  I don t think I spend any more time using this technique than the programmers that stare at the screen trying to figure out the best design up front before writing a line of code   The benefit I get is that I m not having to constantly deal with software that no longer works because I happen to break it somehow and am trying to figure out what stopped working and why

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Programming  It s a fun job   I seem to see two generalized groups of developers  Those that don t love it but they are competent and the money is good  The other group that love it to a point that is kinda creepy  It seems to be their life   I just think it well paying job that is usually interesting and fun  There is all kinds of room to learn something new every minute of every day  I can t think of another job I would prefer  But it is still a job  Compromises will be made and the stuff you produce will not always be as good as it could be   Given my druthers would be on a beach drinking beer or playing with my kids

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Keep your business logic out of the DB  Or at a minimum  keep it very lean  Let the DB do what it s intended to do  Let code do what code is intended to do  Period   If you re a one man show  basically  arrogant  amp  egotistical  not listening to the wisdom of others just because you re in control   do as you wish  I don t believe you re that way since you re asking to begin with  But I ve met a few when it comes to this subject and felt the need to specify  If you work with DBA s but do your own DB work  keep clearly defined partitions between your business objects  the gateway between them and the DB  and the DB itself  If you work with DBA s and aren t allowed to do your DB work  either by policy or because they re premadonnas   you re very close to being a fool placing your reliance on them to get anything done by putting code-dependant business logic in your DB entities  sprocs  functions  etc    If you re a DBA  make developers keep their DB entities clean  amp  lean

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Print statements are a valid way to debug code  I believe it is perfectly fine to debug your code by littering it with System out println  or whatever print statement works for your language    Often  this can be quicker than debugging  and you can compare printed outputs against other runs of the app   Just make sure to remove the print statements when you go to production  or better  turn them into logging statements

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Social skills matter more than technical skills  Agreable but average programmers with good social skills will have a more successful carreer than outstanding programmers who are disagreable people

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My one   Long switch statements are your friends  Really  At least in C    People tend to avoid and discourage others to use long switch statements beause they are  unmanagable  and  have bad performance characteristics    Well  the thing is that in C   switch statements are always compiled automagically to hash jump tables so actually using them is the Best Thing To Do    in terms of performance if you need simple branching to multiple branches  Also  if the case statements are organized and grouped intelligently  for example in alphabetical order   they are not unmanageable at all

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Python does everything that other programming languages do in half the dev time    and so does Google    Check out Unladen Swallow if you disagree   Wait  this is a fact  Does it still qualify as an answer to this question

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Programmers take their  own little limited stupid  programming language as a sacrosanct religion   Its so funny how programmers take these discussions almost like religious believers do  no critics allowed   often  no objective discussion   very often  arguing based upon very limited  or absent knowledge and information  For a confirmation  just read the previous answers  and especially the comments   Also funny and another confirmation  by definition of the question  give me a controversial opinion   any controversion opinion should NOT qualify for negative votes - actually the opposite  the more controversial  the better  But how do our programmers react  like Pavlov s dogs  voting negative on disliked opinions   PS  I upvoted some others for fairness

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That best practices are a hazard because they ask us to substitute slogans for thinking

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You don t always need a database   If you need to store less than a few thousand  things  and you don t need locking  flat files can work and are better in a lot of ways  They are more portable  and you can hand edit them in a pinch  If you have proper separation between your data and business logic  you can easily replace the flat files with a database if your app ever needs it  And if you design it with this in mind  it reminds you to have proper separation between your data and business logic   -- bmb

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90 percent of programmers are pretty damn bad programmers  and virtually all of us have absolutely no tools to evaluate our current ability level  although we can generally look back and realize how bad we USED to suck   I wasn t going to post this because it pisses everyone off and I m not really trying for a negative score or anything  but   A  isn t that the point of the question  and   B  Most of the  Answers  in this thread prove this point  I heard a great analogy the other day   Programming abilities vary AT LEAST as much as sports abilities   How many of us could jump into a professional team and actually improve their chances

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Garbage collection is overrated  Many people consider the introduction of garbage collection in Java one of the biggest improvements compared to C    I consider the introduction to be very minor at best  well written C   code does all the memory management at the proper places  with techniques like RAII   so there is no need for a garbage collector

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If you can only think of one way to do it  don t do it   Whether it s an interface layout  a task flow  or a block of code  just stop   Do something to collect more ideas  like asking other people how they would do it  and don t go back to implementing until you have at least three completely different ideas and at least one crisis of confidence   Generally  when I think something can only be done one way  or think only one method has any merit  it s because I haven t thought through the factors which ought to be influencing the design thoroughly enough   If I had  some of them would clearly be in conflict  leading to a mess and thus an actual decision rather than a rote default   Being a solid programmer does not make you a solid interface designer  And following all of the interface guidelines in the world will only begin to help   If it s even humanly possible     There seems to be a peculiar addiction to making things  cute  and  clever

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Reflection has no place in production code  Reflection breaks static analysis including refactoring tools and static type checking  Reflection also breaks the normal assumptions developers have about code  For example  adding a method to a class  that doesn t shadow some other method in the class  should never have any effect  but when reflection is being used  some other piece of code may  discover  the new method and decide to call it  Actually determining if such code exists is intractable   I do think it s fine to use reflection and tests and in code generators   Yes  this does mean that I try to avoid frameworks that use reflection   it s too bad that Java lacks proper compile-time meta-programming support

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Programming is neither art nor science   It is an engineering discipline   It s not art  programming requires creativity for sure   That doesn t make it art   Code is designed and written to work properly  not to be emotionally moving   Except for whitespace  changing code for aesthetic reasons breaks your code   While code can be beautiful  art is not the primary purpose   It s not science  science and technology are inseparable  but programming is in the technology category   Programming is not systematic study and observation  it is design and implementation   It s an engineering discipline  programmers design and build things   Good programmers design for function   They understand the trade-offs of different implementation options and choose the one that suits the problem they are solving     I m sure there are those out there who would love to parse words  stretching the definitions of art and science to include programming or constraining engineering to mechanical machines or hardware only   Check the dictionary   Also  The Art of Computer Programming  is a different usage of art that means a skill or craft  as in  the art of conversation    The product of programming is not art

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Hardcoding is good   Really  more efficient and much easier to maintain in many cases   The number of times I ve seen constants put into parameter files really how often will you change the freezing point of water or the speed of light   For C programs just hard code these type of values into a header file  for java into a static class etc   When these parameters have a drastic effect on your programs behaviour you really want to do a regresion test on every change  this seems more natural with hard coded values  When things are stored in parameter property files the temptation is to think  this is not a program cahnge so I dont need to test it    The other advantage is it stops people messing with vital values in the parameter property files because there aren t any

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XML and HTML are the  assembly language  of the web  Why still hack it   It seems fairly obvious that very few developers these days learn code in assembly language for reason that it s primitive and takes you far away from the problem you have to solve at high-level  So we invented high-level languages to encapsulates those level entities to boost our productivity thru the language elements that we can relate to more at higher level  Just like we can do more with a computer than just its constituent motherboard or CPU   With the Web  it seems to me developers still are reading writing and hacking HTML CSS XMl schemas  etc   I see these as the equivalent of  assembly language  of the Web or its substrates  Should we be done with it   Sure  we need to hack it sometimes when things go wrong  But surely  that s an exception  I assert that we are replacing lower-level assembly language at machine level with its equivalent at Web-level

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The C   STL library is so general purpose that it is optimal for no one

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Use unit tests as a last resort to verify code   If you I want to verify that code is correct  I prefer the following techniques over unit testing     Type checking Assertions Trivially verifiable code   For everything else  there s unit tests

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All project managers should be required to have coding tasks  In teams that I have worked where the project manager was actually a programmer who understood the technical issues of the code well enough to accomplish coding tasks  the decisions that were made lacked the communication disconnect that often happens in teams where the project manager is not involved in the code

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Design Patterns are a symptom of Stone Age programming language design  They have their purpose  A lot of good software gets built with them  But the fact that there was a need to codify these  recipes  for psychological abstractions about how your code works should work speaks to a lack of programming languages expressive enough to handle this abstraction for us    The remedy  I think  lies in languages that allow you to embed more and more of the design into the code  by defining language constructs that might not exist or might not have general applicability but really really make sense in situations your code deals with incessantly  The Scheme people have known this for years  and there are things possible with Scheme macros that would make most monkeys-for-hire piss their pants

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Software Development is a VERY small subset of Computer Science   People sometimes seem to think the two are synonymous  but in reality there are so many aspects to computer science that the average developer rarely  if ever  gets exposed to   Depending on one s career goals  I think there are a lot of CS graduates out there who would probably have been better off with some sort of Software Engineering education   I value education highly  have a BS in Computer science and am pursuing a MS in it part time  but I think that many people who obtain these degrees treat the degree as a means to an end and benefit very little   I know plenty of people who took the same Systems Software course I took  wrote the same assembler I wrote  and to this day see no value in what they did

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Respect the Single Responsibility Principle  At first glance you might not think this would be controversial  but in my experience when I mention to another developer that they shouldn t be doing everything in the page load method they often push back     so for the children please quit building the  do everything  method we see all to often

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Never make up your mind on an issue before thoroughly considering said issue  No programming standard EVER justifies approaching an issue in a poor manner  If the standard demands a class to be written  but after careful thought  you deem a static method to be more appropriate  always go with the static method  Your own discretion is always better than even the best forward thinking of whoever wrote the standard  Standards are great if you re working in a team  but rules are meant to be broken  in good taste  of course

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Every developer should be familiar with the basic architecture of modern computers  This also applies to developers who target a virtual machine  maybe even more so  because they have been told time and time again that they don t need to worry themselves with memory management etc

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A degree in Computer Science or other IT area DOES make you a more well rounded programmer  I don t care how many years of experience you have  how many blogs you ve read  how many open source projects you re involved in   A qualification  I d recommend longer than 3 years  exposes you to a different way of thinking and gives you a great foundation   Just because you ve written some better code than a guy with a BSc in Computer Science  does not mean you are better than him   What you have he can pick up in an instant which is not the case the other way around   Having a qualification shows your commitment  the fact that you would go above and beyond experience to make you a better developer   Developers which are good at what they do AND have a qualification can be very intimidating   I would not be surprized if this answer gets voted down      Also  once you have a qualification  you slowly stop comparing yourself to those with qualifications  my experience    You realize that it all doesn t matter at the end  as long as you can work well together   Always act mercifully towards other developers  irrespective of qualifications

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We re software developers  not C C  C   PHP Perl Python Java     developers   After you ve been exposed to a few languages  picking up a new one and being productive with it is a small task   That is to say that you shouldn t be afraid of new languages   Of course  there is a large difference between being productive and mastering a language   But  that s no reason to shy away from a language you ve never seen   It bugs me when people say   I m a PHP developer   or when a job offer says   Java developer    After a few years experience of being a developer  new languages and APIs really shouldn t be intimidating and going from never seeing a language to being productive with it shouldn t take very long at all   I know this is controversial but it s my opinion

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My controversial opinion  Java doesn t suck but Java API s do  Why do java libraries insist on making it hard to do simple tasks  And why  instead of fixing the APIs  do they create frameworks to help manage the boilerplate code  This opinion can apply to any language that requires 10 or more lines of code to read a line from a file

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90 percent of programmers are pretty damn bad programmers  and virtually all of us have absolutely no tools to evaluate our current ability level  although we can generally look back and realize how bad we USED to suck   I wasn t going to post this because it pisses everyone off and I m not really trying for a negative score or anything  but   A  isn t that the point of the question  and   B  Most of the  Answers  in this thread prove this point  I heard a great analogy the other day   Programming abilities vary AT LEAST as much as sports abilities   How many of us could jump into a professional team and actually improve their chances

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To Be A Good Programmer really requires working in multiple aspects of the field   Application development  Systems  Kernel  work  User Interface Design  Database  and so on   There are certain approaches common to all  and certain approaches that are specific to one aspect of the job   You need to learn how to program Java like a Java coder  not like a C   coder and vice versa   User Interface design is really hard  and uses a different part of your brain than coding  but implementing that UI in code is yet another skill as well   It is not just that there is no  one  approach to coding  but there is not just one type of coding

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Here s one which has seemed obvious to me for many years but is anathema to everyone else  it is almost always a mistake to switch off C  or C    assertions with NDEBUG in  release  builds   The sole exceptions are where the time or space penalty is unacceptable      Rationale   If an assertion fails  your program has entered a state which    has never been tested the developer was unable to code a recovery strategy for the developer has effectively documented as being inconceivable    Yet somehow  industry best practice  is that the thing should just muddle on and hope for the best when it comes to live runs with your customers  data

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You can t write a web application without a remote debugger  Web applications typically tie together interactions between multiple languages on the client and server side  require interaction from a user and often include third-party code that can be anything from a simple API implementation to a byzantine framework    I ve lost count of the number of times I ve had another developer sat with me while I step into and follow through what s actually going on in a complex web application with a decent remote debugger to see them flabbergasted and amazed that such tools exist  Often they still don t take the trouble to install and setup these kinds of tools even after seeing them in action    You just can t debug a non trivial web application with print statements  Times ten if you didn t right all the code in your application   If your debugger can step through all the various languages in use and show you the http transactions taking place then so much the better    You can t develop web applications without Firebug  Along similar lines  once you have used Firebug  or very near equivalent  you look on anyone trying to develop web applications with a mixture of pity and horror  Particularly with Firebug showing computed styles  if you remember back to NOT using it and spending hours randomly changing various bits of CSS and adding   important  in too many places to be funny you will never go back

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A degree in Computer Science or other IT area DOES make you a more well rounded programmer  I don t care how many years of experience you have  how many blogs you ve read  how many open source projects you re involved in   A qualification  I d recommend longer than 3 years  exposes you to a different way of thinking and gives you a great foundation   Just because you ve written some better code than a guy with a BSc in Computer Science  does not mean you are better than him   What you have he can pick up in an instant which is not the case the other way around   Having a qualification shows your commitment  the fact that you would go above and beyond experience to make you a better developer   Developers which are good at what they do AND have a qualification can be very intimidating   I would not be surprized if this answer gets voted down      Also  once you have a qualification  you slowly stop comparing yourself to those with qualifications  my experience    You realize that it all doesn t matter at the end  as long as you can work well together   Always act mercifully towards other developers  irrespective of qualifications

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If you can only think of one way to do it  don t do it   Whether it s an interface layout  a task flow  or a block of code  just stop   Do something to collect more ideas  like asking other people how they would do it  and don t go back to implementing until you have at least three completely different ideas and at least one crisis of confidence   Generally  when I think something can only be done one way  or think only one method has any merit  it s because I haven t thought through the factors which ought to be influencing the design thoroughly enough   If I had  some of them would clearly be in conflict  leading to a mess and thus an actual decision rather than a rote default   Being a solid programmer does not make you a solid interface designer  And following all of the interface guidelines in the world will only begin to help   If it s even humanly possible     There seems to be a peculiar addiction to making things  cute  and  clever

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Good Coders Code and Great Coders Reuse It  This is happening right now But  Good Coder  is the only ONE who enjoy that code   and  Great Coders  are for only to find out the bug in to that because they don t have the time to think and code  But they have time for find the bug in that code   so don t criticize          Create your own code how YOU want

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The customer is not always right   In most cases that I deal with  the customer is the product owner  aka  the business    All too often  developers just code and do not try to provide a vested stake in the product   There is too much of a misconception that the IT Department is a  company within a company   which is a load of utter garbage   I feel my role is that of helping the business express their ideas - with the mutual understanding that I take an interest in understanding the business so that I can provide the best experience possible   And that route implies that there will be times that the product owner asks for something that he she feels is the next revolution in computing leaving someone to either agree with that fact  or explain the more likely reason of why no one does something a certain way   It is mutually beneficial  because the product owner understands the thought that goes into the product  and the development team understands that they do more than sling code   This has actually started to lead us down the path of increased productivity   How   Since the communication has improved due to disagreements on both sides of the table  it is more likely that we come together earlier in the process and come to a mutually beneficial solution to the product definition

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You only need 3 to 5 languages to do everything  C is a definite  Maybe assembly but you should know it and be able to use it  Maybe javascript and or Java if you code for the web  A shell language like bash and one HLL  like Lisp  which might be useful  Anything else is a distraction

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Hibernate is useless and damaging to the minds of developers

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A Clever Programmer Is Dangerous  I have spent more time trying to fix code written by  clever  programmers  I d rather have a good programmer than an exceptionally smart programmer who wants to prove how clever he is by writing code that only he  or she  can interpret

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As there are hundreds of answers to this mine will probably end up unread  but here s my pet peeve anyway   If you re a programmer then you re most likely awful at Web Design Development  This website is a phenomenal resource for programmers  but an absolutely awful place to come if you re looking for XHTML CSS help  Even the good Web Developers here are handing out links to resources that were good in the 90 s   Sure  XHTML and CSS are simple to learn  However  you re not just learning a language  You re learning how to use it well  and very few designers and developers can do that  let alone programmers  It took me ages to become a capable designer and even longer to become a good developer  I could code in HTML from the age of 10 but that didn t mean I was good  Now I am a capable designer in programs like Photoshop and Illustrator  I am perfectly able to write a good website in Notepad and am able to write basic scripts in several languages  Not only that but I have a good nose for Search Engine Optimisation techniques and can easily tell you where the majority of people are going wrong  hint  get some good content      Also  this place is a terrible resource for advice on web standards  You should NOT just write code to work in the different browsers  You should ALWAYS follow the standard to future-proof your code  More often than not the fixes you use on your websites will break when the next browser update comes along  Not only that but the good browsers follow standards anyway  Finally  the reason IE was allowed to ruin the Internet was because YOU allowed it by coding your websites for IE  If you re going to continue to do that for Firefox then we ll lose out yet again   If you think that table-based layouts are as good  if not better than CSS layouts then you should not be allowed to talk on the subject  at least without me shooting you down first  Also  if you think W3Schools is the best resource to send someone to then you re just plain wrong   If you re new to Web Design Development don t bother with this place  it s full of programmers  not web developers   Go to a good Web Design Development community like SitePoint

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Opinion  SQL is code   Treat it as such  That is  just like your C   Java  or other favorite object procedure language  develop a formatting style that is readable and maintainable     I hate when I see sloppy free-formatted SQL code   If you scream when you see both styles of curly braces on a page  why or why don t you scream when you see free formatted SQL or SQL that obscures or obfuscates the JOIN condition

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1  You should not follow web standards - all the time   2  You don t need to comment your code    As long as it s understandable by a stranger

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To Be A Good Programmer really requires working in multiple aspects of the field   Application development  Systems  Kernel  work  User Interface Design  Database  and so on   There are certain approaches common to all  and certain approaches that are specific to one aspect of the job   You need to learn how to program Java like a Java coder  not like a C   coder and vice versa   User Interface design is really hard  and uses a different part of your brain than coding  but implementing that UI in code is yet another skill as well   It is not just that there is no  one  approach to coding  but there is not just one type of coding

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A programming task is only fun while it s impossible  that is up til the point where you ve convinced yourself you ll be able to solve it successfully    This  I suppose  is why so many of my projects end up halfway finished in a folder called  to be continued

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There s an awful lot of bad teaching out there   We developers like to feel smugly superior when Joel says there s a part of the brain for understanding pointers that some people are just born without  The topics many of us discuss here and are passionate about are esoteric  but sometimes that s only because we make them so

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My controversial opinion  Object Oriented Programming is absolutely the worst thing that s ever happened to the field of software engineering   The primary problem with OOP is the total lack of a rigorous definition that everyone can agree on  This easily leads to implementations that have logical holes in them  or language like Java that adhere to this bizarre religious dogma about what OOP means  while forcing the programmer into doing all these contortions and  design patterns  just to work around the limitations of a particular OOP system   So  OOP tricks the programmer into thinking they re making these huge productivity gains  that OOP is somehow a  natural  way to think  while forcing the programmer to type boatloads of unnecessary boilerplate   Then since nobody knows what OOP actually means  we get vast amounts of time wasted on petty arguments about whether language X or Y is  truly OOP  or not  what bizarre cargo cultish language features are absolutely  essential  for a language to be considered  truly OOP    Instead of demanding that this language or that language be  truly oop   we should be looking at what language features are shown by experiment  to actually increase productivity  instead of trying to force it into being some imagined ideal language  or indeed forcing our programs to conform to some platonic ideal of a  truly object oriented program    Instead of insisting that our programs conform to some platonic ideal of  Truly object oriented   how about we focus on adhering to good engineering principles  making our code easy to read and understand  and using the features of a language that are productive and helpful  regardless of whether they are  OOP  enough or not

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Never implement anything as a singleton   You can decide not to construct more than one instance  but always ensure you implementation can handle more   I have yet to find any scenario where using a singleton  is actually the right thing to do   I got into some very heated discussions over this in the last few years  but in the end I was always right

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XHTML is evil  Write HTML   You will have to set the MIME type to text html anyway  so why fooling yourself into believing that you are really writing XML  Whoever is going to download your page is going to believe that it is HTML  so make it HTML    And with that  feel free and happy to not close your  lt li   it isn t necessary  Don t close the html tag  the file is over anyway  It is valid HTML and it can be parsed perfectly    It will create more readable  less boilerplate code and you don t lose a thing  HTML parsers work good   And when you are done  move on to HTML5  It is better

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The word  evil  is an abused and overused word on Stackoverflow and simular forums    People who use it have too little imagination

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I fail to understand why people think that Java is absolutely the best  first  programming language to be taught in universities    For one  I believe that first programming language should be such that it highlights the need to learn control flow and variables  not objects and syntax  For another  I believe that people who have not had experience in debugging memory leaks in C   C   cannot fully appreciate what Java brings to the table   Also the natural progression should be from  how can I do this  to  how can I find the library which does that  and not the other way round

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Keep your business logic out of the DB  Or at a minimum  keep it very lean  Let the DB do what it s intended to do  Let code do what code is intended to do  Period   If you re a one man show  basically  arrogant  amp  egotistical  not listening to the wisdom of others just because you re in control   do as you wish  I don t believe you re that way since you re asking to begin with  But I ve met a few when it comes to this subject and felt the need to specify  If you work with DBA s but do your own DB work  keep clearly defined partitions between your business objects  the gateway between them and the DB  and the DB itself  If you work with DBA s and aren t allowed to do your DB work  either by policy or because they re premadonnas   you re very close to being a fool placing your reliance on them to get anything done by putting code-dependant business logic in your DB entities  sprocs  functions  etc    If you re a DBA  make developers keep their DB entities clean  amp  lean

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My controversial view is that the  While  construct should be removed from all programming languages    You can easily replicate While using  Repeat  and a boolean flag  and I just don t believe that it s useful to have the two structures  In fact  I think that having both  Repeat   Until  and  While  EndWhile  in a language confuses new programmers    Update - Extra Notes  One common mistake new programmers make with While is they assume that the code will break as soon as the tested condition flags false  So - If the While test flags false half way through the code  they assume a break out of the While Loop  This mistake isn t made as much with Repeat    I m actually not that bothered which of the two loops types is kept  as long as there s only one loop type  Another reason I have for choosing Repeat over While is that  While  functionality makes more sense written using  repeat  than the other way around    Second Update  I m guessing that the fact I m the only person currently running with a negative score here means this actually is a controversial opinion   Unlike the rest of you  Ha

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Don t comment your code  Comments are not code and therefore when things change it s very easy to not change the comment that explained the code   Instead I prefer to refactor the crap out of code to a point that there is no reason for a comment   An example   if data    null      First time on the page   to   bool firstTimeOnPage   data    null  if firstTimeOnPage    The only time I really comment is when it s a TODO or explaining why  Widget GetData       only way to grab data  TODO  extract interface or wrapper

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Member variables should never be declared private  in java      If you declare something private  you prevent any future developer from deriving from your class and extending the functionality   Essentially  by writing  private  you are implying that you know more now about how your class can be used than any future developer might ever know      Whenever you write  private   you ought to write  protected  instead   Classes should never be declared final  in java   Similarly  if you declare a class as final  which prevents it from being extended -- prevents it from being used as a base class for inheritance   you are implying that you know more than any future programmer might know  about what is the right and proper way to use your class    This never a good idea   You don t know everything   Someone might come up with a perfectly suitable way to extend your class that you didn t think of   Java Beans are a terrible idea   The java bean convention -- declaring all members as private and then writing  get   and set   methods for every member -- forces programmers to write boilerplate  error-prone  tedious  and lengthy code  where no code is needed    Just make public members variables public   Trust in your ability to change it later  if you need to change the implementation  hint  99  of the time  you never will

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Excessive HTML in PHP files  sometimes necessary  Excessive Javascript in PHP files  trigger the raptor attack  While I have a hard time figuring out all your switching between echoing and    lt   php  ing html  after all  php is just a processor for html   lines and lines of javascript added in make it a completely unmaintainable mess   People have to grasp this  They are two separate programming languages  Pick one to be your primary language  Then go on and find a quick  clean and easily maintainable way to make your primary include the secondary language   The reason why you jump between PHP  Javascript and HTML all the time is because you are bad at all three of them   Ok  maybe its not exactly controversial  I had the impression this was a general frustration venting topic

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I believe that the  Let s Rewrite The Past And Try To Fix That Bug Pretending Nothing Ever Worked  is a valuable debugging mantra in desperate situations   https   stackoverflow com questions 978904 do-you-use-the-orwellian-past-rewriting-debugging-philosophy-closed

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XML is highly overrated  I think too many jump onto the XML bandwagon before using their brains    XML for web stuff is great  as it s designed for it  Otherwise I think some problem definition and design thoughts should preempt any decision to use it    My 5 cents

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The world needs more GOTOs  GOTOs are avoided religiously often with no reasoning beyond  my professor told me GOTOs are bad    They have a purpose and would greatly simplify production code in many places   That said  they aren t really necessary in 99  of the code you ll ever write

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Not very controversial AFAIK but    AJAX was around way before the term was coined and everyone needs to  let it go    People were using it for all sorts of things   No one really cared about it though   Then suddenly POW   Someone coined the term and everyone jumped on the AJAX bandwagon   Suddenly people are now experts in AJAX  as if  experts  in dynamically loading data weren t around before   I think its one of the biggest contributing factors that is leading to the brutal destruction of the internet   That and  Web 2 0

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Opinion  developers should be testing their own code  I ve seen too much crap handed off to test only to have it not actually fix the bug in question  incurring communication overhead and fostering irresponsible practices

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People complain about removing  goto  from the language  I happen to think that any sort of conditional jump is highly overrated and that  if   while   switch  and a general purpose  for  loop are highly overrated and should be used with extreme caution   Everytime you make a comparison and conditional jump a tiny bit of complexity is added and this complexity adds up quickly once the call stack gets a couple hundred items deep   My first choice is to avoid the conditional  but if it isn t practical my next preference is to keep the conditional complexity in constructors or factory methods   Clearly this isn t practical for many projects and algorithms  like control flow loops   but it is something I enjoy pushing on   -Rick

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Programmers take their  own little limited stupid  programming language as a sacrosanct religion   Its so funny how programmers take these discussions almost like religious believers do  no critics allowed   often  no objective discussion   very often  arguing based upon very limited  or absent knowledge and information  For a confirmation  just read the previous answers  and especially the comments   Also funny and another confirmation  by definition of the question  give me a controversial opinion   any controversion opinion should NOT qualify for negative votes - actually the opposite  the more controversial  the better  But how do our programmers react  like Pavlov s dogs  voting negative on disliked opinions   PS  I upvoted some others for fairness

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I m probably gonna get roasted for this  but   Making invisible characters syntactically significant in python was a bad idea  It s distracting  causes lots of subtle bugs for novices and  in my opinion  wasn t really needed  About the only code I ve ever seen that didn t voluntarily follow some sort of decent formatting guide was from first-year CS students  And even if code doesn t follow  nice  standards  there are plenty of tools out there to coerce it into a more pleasing shape

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Excessive HTML in PHP files  sometimes necessary  Excessive Javascript in PHP files  trigger the raptor attack  While I have a hard time figuring out all your switching between echoing and    lt   php  ing html  after all  php is just a processor for html   lines and lines of javascript added in make it a completely unmaintainable mess   People have to grasp this  They are two separate programming languages  Pick one to be your primary language  Then go on and find a quick  clean and easily maintainable way to make your primary include the secondary language   The reason why you jump between PHP  Javascript and HTML all the time is because you are bad at all three of them   Ok  maybe its not exactly controversial  I had the impression this was a general frustration venting topic

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Don t use stored procs in your database   The reasons they were originally good - security  abstraction  single connection - can all be done in your middle tier with ORMs that integrate lots of other advantages   This one is definitely controversial   Every time I bring it up  people tear me apart

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XML is highly overrated  I think too many jump onto the XML bandwagon before using their brains    XML for web stuff is great  as it s designed for it  Otherwise I think some problem definition and design thoughts should preempt any decision to use it    My 5 cents

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Social skills matter more than technical skills  Agreable but average programmers with good social skills will have a more successful carreer than outstanding programmers who are disagreable people

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Don t write code  remove code   As a smart teacher once told me   Don t write code  Writing code is bad  Removing code is good  and if you have to write code - write small code

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Writing it yourself can be a valid option   In my experience there seems to be too much enthusiasm when it comes to using 3rd party code to solve a problem  The option of solving the problem by themselves does usually not cross peoples minds  Although don t get me wrong  I am not propagating to never ever use libraries  What I am saying is  among the possible frameworks and modules you are considering to use  add the option of implementing the solution yourself   But why would you code your own version    Don t reinvent the wheel  But  if you only need a piece of wood  do you really need a whole cart wheel  In other words  do you really need openCV to flip an image along an axis  Compromise  You usually have to make compromises concerning your design  in order to be able to use a specific library  Is the amount of changes you have to incorporate worth the functionality you will receive  Learning  You have to learn to use these new frameworks and modules  How long will it take you  Is it worth your while  Will it take longer to learn than to implement  Cost  Not everything is for free  Although  this includes your time  Consider how much time this software you are about to use will save you and if it is worth it s price   Also remember that you have to invest time to learn it  You are a programmer  not     a person who just clicks things together  sorry  couldn t think of anything witty      The last point is debatable

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The more process you put around programming  the worse the code becomes  I have noticed something in my 8 or so years of programming  and it seems ridiculous  It s that the only way to get quality is to employ quality developers  and remove as much process and formality from them as you can  Unit testing  coding standards  code peer reviews  etc only reduce quality  not increase it  It sounds crazy  because the opposite should be true  more unit testing should lead to better code  great coding standards should lead to more readable code  code reviews should improve the quality of code  but it s not   I think it boils down to the fact we call it  Software Engineering  when really it s design and not engineering at all     Some numbers to substantiate this statement      From the Editor      IEEE Software  November December 2001      Quantifying Soft Factors      by Steve McConnell               Limited Importance of Process Maturity            In comparing medium-size projects    100 000 lines of code   the one with   the worst process will require 1 43   times as much effort as the one with   the best process  all other things   being equal  In other words  the   maximum influence of process maturity   on a project   s productivity is 1 43               What Clark doesn   t emphasize is that   for a program of 100 000 lines of   code  several human-oriented factors   influence productivity more than   process does               The seniority-oriented factors alone    AEXP  LTEX  PEXP  exert an influence   of 3 02  The seven   personnel-oriented factors   collectively  ACAP  AEXP  LTEX    PCAP  PCON  PEXP  and SITE     exert a   staggering influence range of 25 8    This simple fact accounts for much of   the reason that non-process-oriented   organizations such as Microsoft    Amazon com  and other entrepreneurial   powerhouses can experience   industry-leading productivity while   seemingly shortchanging process           The Bottom Line          It turns out that trading process   sophistication for staff continuity    business domain experience  private   offices  and other human-oriented   factors is a sound economic tradeoff    Of course  the best organizations   achieve high motivation and process   sophistication at the same time  and   that is the key challenge for any   leading software organization       Read the article for an explanation of these acronyms

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Code Generation is bad  I hate languages that require you to make use of code generation  or copy amp paste  for simple things  like JavaBeans with all their Getters and Setters   C  s AutoProperties are a step in the right direction  but for nice DTOs with Fields  Properties and Constructor parameters you still need a lot of redundancy

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Software engineers should not work with computer science guys  Their differences   SEs care about code reusability  while CSs just suss out code SEs care about performance  while CSs just want to have things done now SEs care about whole structure  while CSs do not give a toss

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How about this one   Garbage collectors actually hurt programmers  productivity and make resource leaks harder to find and fix  Note that I am talking about resouces in general  and not only memory

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Write small methods   It seems that programmers love to write loooong methods where they do multiple different things     I think that a method should be created wherever you can name one

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Junior programmers should be assigned to doing object  module design and design maintenance for several months before they are allowed to actually write or modify code   Too many programmers developers make it to the 5 and 10 year marks without understanding the elements of good design  It can be crippling later when they want to advance beyond just writing and maintaining code

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Reuse of code is inversely proportional to its  reusability    Simply because  reusable  code is more complex  whereas quick hacks are easy to understand  so they get reused   Software failures should take down the system  so that it can be examined and fixed   Software attempting to handle failure conditions is often worse than crashing   ie  is it better to have a system reset after crashing  or should it be indefinitely hung because the failure handler has a bug

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Programmers must do programming on the side  or they re never as good as those who do    As kpollock said  imagine saying that for doctors  or soldiers     The main thing isn t so much as whether they code  but whether they think about it  Computing Science is an intellectual exercise  you don t necessarily need to code to think about problems that makes you better as a programmer   It s not like Einstein gets to play with play with particles and waves when he s off his research

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Relational Databases are a waste of time  Use object databases instead   Relational database vendors try to fool us into believing that the only scaleable  persistent and safe storage in the world is relational databases  I am a certified DBA  Have you ever spent hours trying to optimize a query and had no idea what was going wrong  Relational databases don t let you make your own  search paths when you need them  You give away much of the control over the speed of your app into the hands of people you ve never met and they are not as smart as you think    Sure  sometimes in a well-maintained database they come up with a quick answer for a complex query  But the price you pay for this is too high  You have to choose between writing raw SQL every time you want to read an entry of your data  which is dangerous  Or use an Object relational mapper which adds more complexity and things outside your control    More importantly  you are actively forbidden from coming up with smart search algorithms  because every damn roundtrip to the database costs you around 11ms  It is too much  Imagine you know this super-graph algorithm which will answer a specific question  which might not even be expressible in SQL   in due time  But even if your algorithm is linear  and interesting algorithms are not linear  forget about combining it with a relational database as enumerating a large table will take you hours   Compare that with SandstoneDb  or Gemstone for Smalltalk  If you are into Java  give db4o a shot    So  my advice is  Use an object-DB  Sure  they aren t perfect and some queries will be slower  But you will be surprised how many will be faster  Because loading the objects will not require all these strange transofmations between SQL and your domain data  And if you really need speed for a certain query  object databases have the query optimizer you should trust  your brain

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SESE  Single Entry Single Exit  is not law  Example   public int foo        if  someCondition           return 0           return -1      vs   public int foo        int returnValue   -1      if  someCondition           returnValue   0           return returnValue      My team and I have found that abiding by this all the time is actually counter-productive in many cases

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Human brain is the master key to all locks   There is nothing in this world that can move faster your brain  Trust me this is not philosophical but practical  Well as far as opinions are concerned   they are as under    1  Never go outside the boundry specified in the programming language  A simple example would be pointers in C and C     Dont misuse them as you are likely to get the DAMN SEGMENTATION FAULT   2  Always follow the coding standards  yes what you are reading is correct  Coding standards do alot to your program  After all your program is written to be executed by machine but to be understood by some other brain

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Readability is the most important aspect of your code   Even more so than correctness   If it s readable  it s easy to fix   It s also easy to optimize  easy to change  easy to understand   And hopefully other developers can learn something from it too

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When someone dismisses an entire programming language as  clumsy   it usually turns out he doesn t know how to use it

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Classes should fit on the screen   If you have to use the scroll bar to see all of your class  your class is too big     Code folding and miniature fonts are cheating

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1  The Business Apps farce   I think that the whole  Enterprise  frameworks thing is smoke and mirrors  J2EE   NET  the majority of the Apache frameworks and most abstractions to manage such things create far more complexity than they solve   Take any regular Java or  NET ORM  or any supposedly modern MVC framework for either which does  magic  to solve tedious  simple tasks  You end up writing huge amounts of ugly XML boilerplate that is difficult to validate and write quickly  You have massive APIs where half of those are just to integrate the work of the other APIs  interfaces that are impossible to recycle  and abstract classes that are needed only to overcome the inflexibility of Java and C   We simply don t need most of that   How about all the different application servers with their own darned descriptor syntax  the overly complex database and groupware products   The point of this is not that complexity  bad  it s that unnecessary complexity  bad  I ve worked in massive enterprise installations where some of it was necessary  but even in most cases a few home-grown scripts and a simple web frontend is all that s needed to solve most use cases   I d try to replace all of these enterprisey apps with simple web frameworks  open source DBs  and trivial programming constructs   2  The n-years-of-experience-required   Unless you need a consultant or a technician to handle a specific issue related to an application  API or framework  then you don t really need someone with 5 years of experience in that application  What you need is a developer admin who can read documentation  who has domain knowledge in whatever it is you re doing  and who can learn quickly  If you need to develop in some kind of language  a decent developer will pick it up in less than 2 months  If you need an administrator for X web server  in two days he should have read the man pages and newsgroups and be up to speed  Anything less and that person is not worth what he is paid   3  The common  computer science  degree curriculum   The majority of computer science and software engineering degrees are bull  If your first programming language is Java or C   then you re doing something wrong  If you don t get several courses full of algebra and math  it s wrong  If you don t delve into functional programming  it s incomplete  If you can t apply loop invariants to a trivial for loop  you re not worth your salt as a supposed computer scientist  If you come out with experience in x and y languages and object orientation  it s full of s     A real computer scientist sees a language in terms of the concepts and syntaxes it uses  and sees programming methodologies as one among many  and has such a good understanding of the underlying philosophies of both that picking new languages  design methods  or specification languages should be trivial

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I really dislike when people tell me to use getters and setters instead of making the variable public when you should be able to both get and set the class variable    I totally agree on it if it s to change a variable in an object in your object  so you don t get things like  a b c d e   something  but I would rather use  a x   something  then a setX something   I think a x   something  actually are both easier to read  and prettier then set get in the same example   I don t see the reason by making   void setX T x        this- x   x     T getX         return x     which is more code  more time when you do it over and over again  and just makes the code harder to read

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To produce great software  you need domain specialists as much as good developers

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Schooling ruins creativity      Ruins  means  potentially ruins   Granted  schooling is needed  Everyone needs to learn stuff before they can use it - however  all those great ideas you had about how to do a certain strategy for a specific business-field can easily be thrown into that deep brain-void of ours if we aren t careful   As you learn new things and acquire new skills  you are also boxing your mindset on those new things and skills  since they apparently are  the way to do it   Being humans  we tend to listen to authorities - being it a teacher  a consultant  a co-worker or even a site   forum you like  We should ALWAYS be aware of that  flaw  in how our mind works  Listen to what other people say  but don t take what they say for granted  Always keep a critic point-of-view on every new information you receive   Instead of thinking  Wow  that s smart  I will use that from now on   we should think  Wow  that s smart  Now  how can I use that in my personal toolbox of skills and ideas

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If you only know one language  no matter how well you know it  you re not a great programmer   There seems to be an attitude that says once you re really good at C  or Java or whatever other language you started out learning then that s all you need  I don t believe it- every language I have ever learned has taught me something new about programming that I have been able to bring back into my work with all the others  I think that anyone who restricts themselves to one language will never be as good as they could be   It also indicates to me a certain lack of inquistiveness and willingness to experiment that doesn t necessarily tally with the qualities I would expect to find in a really good programmer

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Believe it or not  my belief that  in an OO language  most of the  business logic  code that operates on a class s data should be in the class itself is heresy on my team

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Good Coders Code and Great Coders Reuse It  This is happening right now But  Good Coder  is the only ONE who enjoy that code   and  Great Coders  are for only to find out the bug in to that because they don t have the time to think and code  But they have time for find the bug in that code   so don t criticize          Create your own code how YOU want

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Hibernate is useless and damaging to the minds of developers

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Googling it  is okay   Yes  I know it offends some people out there that their years of intense memorization and or glorious stacks of programming books are starting to fall by the wayside to a resource that anyone can access within seconds  but you shouldn t hold that against people that use it   Too often I hear googling answers to problems the result of criticism  and it really is without sense   First of all  it must be conceded that everyone needs materials to reference   You don t know everything and you will need to look things up   Conceding that  does it really matter where you got the information   Does it matter if you looked it up in a book  looked it up on Google  or heard it from a talking frog that you hallucinated   No   A right answer is a right answer   What is important is that you understand the material  use it as the means to an end of a successful programming solution  and the client your employer is happy with the results    although if you are getting answers from hallucinatory talking frogs  you should probably get some help all the same

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Opinion  SQL is code   Treat it as such  That is  just like your C   Java  or other favorite object procedure language  develop a formatting style that is readable and maintainable     I hate when I see sloppy free-formatted SQL code   If you scream when you see both styles of curly braces on a page  why or why don t you scream when you see free formatted SQL or SQL that obscures or obfuscates the JOIN condition

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Don t be shy  throw an exception  Exceptions are a perfectly valid way to signal failure  and are much clearer than any return-code system   Exceptional  has nothing to do with how often this can happen  and everything to do with what the class considers normal execution conditions  Throwing an exception when a division by zero occurs is just fine  regardless of how often the case can happen  If the problem is likely  guard your code so that the method doesn t get called with incorrect arguments

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Linq2Sql is not that bad  I ve come across a lot of posts trashing Linq2Sql  I know it s not perfect  but what is   Personally  I think it has its drawbacks  but overall it can be great for prototyping  or for developing small to medium apps  When I consider how much time it has saved me from writing boring DAL code  I can t complain  especially considering the alternatives we had not so long ago

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2 space indent   No discussion  It just has to be that way  -

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I generally hold pretty controversial  strong and loud opinions  so here s just a couple of them    Because we re a Microsoft outfit partner specialist  is never a valid argument   The company I m working in now identifies itself  first and foremost  as a Microsoft specialist  So the aforementioned argument gets thrown around quite a bit  and I ve yet to see a context where it s valid   I can t see why it s a reason to promote Microsoft s technology and products in every applicable corner  overriding customer and employee satisfaction  and general pragmatics   This just a cornerstone of my deep hatred towards politics in software business   MOSS  Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server  is a piece of shit   Kinda echoes the first opinion  but I honestly think MOSS  as it is  should be shot out of the market  It costs gazillions to license and set up  pukes on web standards and makes developers generally pretty unhappy  I have yet to see a MOSS project that has an overall positive outcome   Yet time after time  a customer approaches us and asks for a MOSS solution

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It s ok to write garbage code once in a while  Sometimes a quick and dirty piece of garbage code is all that is needed to fulfill a particular task   Patterns  ORMs  SRP  whatever     Throw up a Console or Web App  write some inline sql   feels good    and blast out the requirement

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Write your spec when you are finished coding   if at all   In many projects I have been involved in  a great deal of effort was spent at the outset writing a  spec  in Microsoft Word  This process culminated in a  sign off  meeting when the big shots bought in on the project  and after that meeting nobody ever looked at this document again  These documents are a complete waste of time and don t reflect how software is actually designed  This is not to say there are not other valuable artifacts of application design  They are usually contained on index cards  snapshots of whiteboards  cocktail napkins and other similar media that provide a kind of timeline for the app design  These are usually are the real specs of the app  If you are going to write a Word document   and I am not particularly saying you should  do it at the end of the project  At least it will accurately represent what has been done in the code and might help someone down the road like the the QA team or the next version developers

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If it isn t worth testing  it isn t worth building

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Object Oriented Programming is overused  Sometimes the best answer is the simple answer

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Before January 1st 1970  true and false were the other way around

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Apparently it is controversial that IDE s should check to see whether they can link up the code they create before wasting time compiling   But I m of the opinion that I shouldn t compile a zillion lines of code only to realize that Windows has a lock on the file I m trying to create because another programmer has some weird threading issue that requires him to Delay Unloading DLLs for 3 minutes after they aren t supposed to be used

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Notepad is a perfectly fine text editor   And sometimes wordpad for non-windows line breaks    Edit config files View log files Development   I know people who actually believe this   They will however use an IDE for development  but continue to use Notepad for everything else

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Macros  Preprocessor instructions and Annotations are evil   One syntax and language per file please      does not apply to Make files  or editor macros that insert real code

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Primitive data types are premature optimization   There are languages that get by with just one data type  the scalar  and they do just fine   Other languages are not so fortunate   Developers just throw  int  and  double  in because they have to write in something   What s important is not how big the data types are  but what the data is used for   If you have a day of the month variable  it doesn t matter much if it s signed or unsigned  or whether it s char  short  int  long  long long  float  double  or long double   It does matter that it s a day of the month  and not a month  or day of week  or whatever   See Joel s column on making things that are wrong look wrong  Hungarian notation as originally proposed was a Good Idea   As used in practice  it s mostly useless  because it says the wrong thing

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1  You should not follow web standards - all the time   2  You don t need to comment your code    As long as it s understandable by a stranger

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Architects that do not code are useless   That sounds a little harsh  but it s not unreasonable  If you are the  architect  for a system  but do not have some amount of hands-on involvement with the technologies employed then how do you get the respect of the development team  How do you influence direction   Architects need to do a lot more  meet with stakeholders  negotiate with other teams  evaluate vendors  write documentation  give presentations  etc   But  if you never see code checked in from by your architect    be wary

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Use type inference anywhere and everywhere possible     Edit    Here is a link to a blog entry I wrote several months ago about why I feel this way    http   blogs msdn com jaredpar archive 2008 09 09 when-to-use-type-inference aspx

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I don t care how powerful a programming language is if its syntax is not intuitive and I can t set it aside for some period of time and come back to it without too much effort at refreshing on the details   I would rather a language itself be intuitive than it be cryptic but powerful for creating DSL s   A computer language is a user interface for ME  and I want it designed for intuitive ease of use like any other user interface

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Storing XML in a CLOB in a relational database is often a horrible cop-out   Not only is it hideous in terms of performance  it shifts responsibility for correctly managing structure of the data away from the database architect and onto the application programmer

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Uncommented code is the bane of humanity   I think that comments are necessary for code   They visually divide it up into logical parts  and provide an alternative representation when reading code   Documentation comments are the bare minimum  but using comments to split up longer functions helps when writing new code and allows quicker analysis when returning to existing code

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Readability is the most important aspect of your code   Even more so than correctness   If it s readable  it s easy to fix   It s also easy to optimize  easy to change  easy to understand   And hopefully other developers can learn something from it too

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Regurgitating well known sayings by programming greats out of context with the zeal of a fanatic and the misplaced assumption that they are ironclad rules really gets my goat   For example  premature optimization is the root of all evil  as covered by this thread   IMO  many technical problems and solutions are very context sensitive and the notion of global best practices is a fallacy

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As there are hundreds of answers to this mine will probably end up unread  but here s my pet peeve anyway   If you re a programmer then you re most likely awful at Web Design Development  This website is a phenomenal resource for programmers  but an absolutely awful place to come if you re looking for XHTML CSS help  Even the good Web Developers here are handing out links to resources that were good in the 90 s   Sure  XHTML and CSS are simple to learn  However  you re not just learning a language  You re learning how to use it well  and very few designers and developers can do that  let alone programmers  It took me ages to become a capable designer and even longer to become a good developer  I could code in HTML from the age of 10 but that didn t mean I was good  Now I am a capable designer in programs like Photoshop and Illustrator  I am perfectly able to write a good website in Notepad and am able to write basic scripts in several languages  Not only that but I have a good nose for Search Engine Optimisation techniques and can easily tell you where the majority of people are going wrong  hint  get some good content      Also  this place is a terrible resource for advice on web standards  You should NOT just write code to work in the different browsers  You should ALWAYS follow the standard to future-proof your code  More often than not the fixes you use on your websites will break when the next browser update comes along  Not only that but the good browsers follow standards anyway  Finally  the reason IE was allowed to ruin the Internet was because YOU allowed it by coding your websites for IE  If you re going to continue to do that for Firefox then we ll lose out yet again   If you think that table-based layouts are as good  if not better than CSS layouts then you should not be allowed to talk on the subject  at least without me shooting you down first  Also  if you think W3Schools is the best resource to send someone to then you re just plain wrong   If you re new to Web Design Development don t bother with this place  it s full of programmers  not web developers   Go to a good Web Design Development community like SitePoint

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Here s one which has seemed obvious to me for many years but is anathema to everyone else  it is almost always a mistake to switch off C  or C    assertions with NDEBUG in  release  builds   The sole exceptions are where the time or space penalty is unacceptable      Rationale   If an assertion fails  your program has entered a state which    has never been tested the developer was unable to code a recovery strategy for the developer has effectively documented as being inconceivable    Yet somehow  industry best practice  is that the thing should just muddle on and hope for the best when it comes to live runs with your customers  data

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Debuggers are a crutch   It s so controversial that even I don t believe it as much as I used to   Con  I spend more time getting up to speed on other people s voluminous code  so anything that help with  how did I get here  and  what is happening  either pre-mortem or post-mortem can be helpful   Pro  However  I happily stand by the idea that if you don t understand the answers to those questions for code that you developed yourself or that you ve become familiar with  spending all your time in a debugger is not the solution  it s part of the problem   Before hitting  Post Your Answer  I did a quick Google check for this exact phrase  it turns out that I m not the only one who has held this opinion or used this phrase   I turned up a long discussion of this very question on the Fog Creek software forum  which cited various luminaries including Linus Torvalds as notable proponents

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Opinion  Never ever have different code between  debug  and  release  builds  The main reason being that release code almost never gets tested  Better to have the same code running in test as it is in the wild

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Code    Design  I m no fan of sophisticated UML diagrams and endless code documentation  In a high level language  your code should be readable and understandable as is  Complex documentation and diagrams aren t really any more user friendly     Here s an article on the topic of Code as Design

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A good developer needs to know more than just how to code

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I really dislike when people tell me to use getters and setters instead of making the variable public when you should be able to both get and set the class variable    I totally agree on it if it s to change a variable in an object in your object  so you don t get things like  a b c d e   something  but I would rather use  a x   something  then a setX something   I think a x   something  actually are both easier to read  and prettier then set get in the same example   I don t see the reason by making   void setX T x        this- x   x     T getX         return x     which is more code  more time when you do it over and over again  and just makes the code harder to read

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Remove classes  Number of classes  methods of classes  in  NET Framework handles exception implicitly  It s difficult to work with a dumb person

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Sometimes jumping on the bandwagon is ok  I get tired of people exhibiting  grandpa syndrome    You kids and your newfangled Test Driven Development   Every big technology that s come out in the last decade has sucked   Back in my day  we wrote real code      you get the idea    Sometimes things that are popular are popular for a reason

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The worst thing about recursion is recursion

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USE of Desgin patterns and documentation   in web devlopment whats use of these things never felt any use of it

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When Creating Unit tests for a Data Access Layer  data should be retrieved directly from the DB  not from mock objects    Consider the following   void IList lt Customer gt  GetCustomers       List lt Customer gt  res   new List lt Customer gt        DbCommand cmd      initialize command   IDataReader r   cmd ExecuteQuery       while r read             Customer c   ReadFiledsIntoCustomer r        res Add c          return res      In a unit test for GetCustomers  should the call to cmd ExecuteQuery   actually access the DB or should it s behavior be mocked   I reckon that you shouldn t mock the actual call to the DB if the following holds true    A test server and the schema exist  The schema is stable  meaning you are not expecting major changes to it  The DAL has not smart logic  queries are constructed trivially  config stored procs  and the desirialization logic is simple    From my experience the great benefit of this approach is that you get to interact with the DB early  experiancing the  feel   not just the  look   It saves you lots of headaches afterwards and is the best way to familiarize oneself with the schema   Many might argue that as soon as the execution flow crosses the process boundaries- it seizes to be a unit test  I agree it has its drawbacks  especially when the DB is unavailable and then you cannot run UT   However  I believe that this should be a valid thing to do in many cases

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If you only know one language  no matter how well you know it  you re not a great programmer   There seems to be an attitude that says once you re really good at C  or Java or whatever other language you started out learning then that s all you need  I don t believe it- every language I have ever learned has taught me something new about programming that I have been able to bring back into my work with all the others  I think that anyone who restricts themselves to one language will never be as good as they could be   It also indicates to me a certain lack of inquistiveness and willingness to experiment that doesn t necessarily tally with the qualities I would expect to find in a really good programmer

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Java Sucks  - yeah  I know that opinion is definitely not held by all     I have that opinion because the majority of Java applications I ve seen are memory hogs  run slowly  horrible user interface and so on   G-Man

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PHP sucks  -   The proof is in the pudding

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C  or C    should be the first programming language  The first language should NOT be the easy one  it should be one that sets up the student s mind and prepare it for serious computer science  C is perfect for that  it forces students to think about memory and all the low level stuff  and at the same time they can learn how to structure their code  it has functions    C   has the added advantage that it really sucks    thus the students will understand why people had to come up with Java and C

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There is no such thing as Object-Oriented programming

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Garbage collection is overrated  Many people consider the introduction of garbage collection in Java one of the biggest improvements compared to C    I consider the introduction to be very minor at best  well written C   code does all the memory management at the proper places  with techniques like RAII   so there is no need for a garbage collector

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The use of hungarian notation should be punished with death    That should be controversial enough

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Developers are all different  and should be treated as such   Developers don t fit into a box  and shouldn t be treated as such  The best language or tool for solving a problem has just as much to do with the developers as it does with the details of the problem being solved

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Extension Methods are the work of the Devil  Everyone seems to think that extension methods in  Net are the best thing since sliced bread  The number of developers singing their praises seems to rise by the minute but I m afraid I can t help but despise them and unless someone can come up with a brilliant justification or example that I haven t already heard then I will never write one  I recently came across this thread and I must say reading the examples of the highest voted extensions made me feel a little like vomiting  metaphorically of course    The main reasons given for their extensiony goodness are increased readability  improved OO-ness and the ability to chain method calls better   I m afraid I have to differ  I find in fact that they  unequivocally  reduce readability and OO-ness by virtue of the fact that they are at their core a lie  If you need a utility method that acts upon an object then write a utility method that acts on that object don t lie to me  When I see aString SortMeBackwardsUsingKlingonSortOrder then string should have that method because that is telling me something about the string object not something about the AnnoyingNerdReferences StringUtilities class   LINQ was designed in such a way that chained method calls are necessary to avoid strange and uncomfortable expressions and the extension methods that arise from LINQ are understandable but in general chained method calls reduce readability and lead to code of the sort we see in obfuscated Perl contests   So  in short  extension methods are evil  Cast off the chains of Satan and commit yourself to extension free code

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switch-case is not object oriented programming   I often see a lot of switch-case or awful big if-else constructs  This is merely a sign for not putting state where it belongs and don t use the real and efficient switch-case construct that is already there  method lookup vtable

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We do a lot of development here using a Model-View-Controller framework we built  I m often telling my developers that we need to violate the rules of the MVC design pattern to make the site run faster  This is a hard sell for developers  who are usually unwilling to sacrifice well-designed code for anything  But performance is our top priority in building web applications  so sometimes we have to make concessions in the framework   For example  the view layer should never talk directly to the database  right  But if you are generating large reports  the app will use a lot of memory to pass that data up through the model and controller layers  If you have a database that supports cursors  it can make the app a lot faster to hit the database directly from the view layer   Performance trumps development standards  that s my controversial view

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Relational databases are awful for web applications   For example    threaded comments tag clouds user search maintaining record view counts providing undo   revision tracking multi-step wizards

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There are some  very few  legitimate uses for goto  particularly in C  as a stand-in for exception handling

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Intranet Frameworks like SharePoint makes me think the whole corporate world is one giant ostrich with its head in the sand  I m not only talking about MOSS here  I ve worked with some other CORPORATE INTRANET products  and absolutely not one of them are great  but SharePoint  MOSS  is by far the worst     Most of these systems don t easily bridge the gap between Intranet and Internet  So as a remote worker you re forced to VPN in  External customers just don t have the luxury of getting hold of your internal information first hand  Sure this can be fixed at a price       The search capabilities are always pathetic  Lots of time other departments simply don t know about information is out there   Information fragments  people start boycotting workflows or revert to email SharePoint development is the most painful form of development on the planet  Nothing sucks like SharePoint  I ve seen a few developers contemplating quitting IT after working for over a year with MOSS   No matter how the developers hate MOSS  no matter how long the most basic of projects take to roll out  no matter how novice the results look  and no matter how unsearchable and fragmented the content is    EVERYONE STILL CONTINUES TO USE AND PURCHASE SHAREPOINT  AND MANAGERS STILL TRY VERY HARD TO PRETEND ITS NOT SATANS SPAWN    Microformats  Using CSS classes originally designed for visual layout - now being assigned for both visual and contextual data is a hack  loads of ambiguity  Not saying the functionality should not exist  but fix the damn base language  HTML wasn t hacked to produce XML - instead the XML language emerged  Now we have these eager script kiddies hacking HTML and CSS to do something it wasn t designed to do  thats still fine  but I wish they would keep these things to themselves  and no make a standard out of it  Just to some up - butchery

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Not very controversial AFAIK but    AJAX was around way before the term was coined and everyone needs to  let it go    People were using it for all sorts of things   No one really cared about it though   Then suddenly POW   Someone coined the term and everyone jumped on the AJAX bandwagon   Suddenly people are now experts in AJAX  as if  experts  in dynamically loading data weren t around before   I think its one of the biggest contributing factors that is leading to the brutal destruction of the internet   That and  Web 2 0

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Delphi is fun  Yes  I know it s outdated  but Delphi was and is a very fun tool to develop with

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Using Stored Procedures  Unless you are writing a large procedural function composed of non-reusable SQL queries  please move your stored procedures of the database and into version control

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C   is a good language  I practically got lynched in another question a week or two back for saying that C   wasn t a very nice language  So now I ll try saying the opposite      No  seriously  the point I tried to make then  and will try again now  is that C   has plenty of flaws  It s hard to deny that  It s so extremely complicated that learning it well is practically something you can dedicate your entire life to  It makes many common tasks needlessly hard  allows the user to plunge head-first into a sea of undefined behavior and unportable code  with no warnings given by the compiler   But it s not the useless  decrepit  obsolete  hated language that many people try to make it  It shouldn t be swept under the carpet and ignored  The world wouldn t be a better place without it  It has some unique strengths that  unfortunately  are hidden behind quirky syntax  legacy cruft and not least  bad C   teachers  But they re there   C   has many features that I desperately miss when programming in C  or other  modern  languages  There s a lot in it that C  and other modern languages could learn from   It s not blindly focused on OOP  but has instead explored and pioneered generic programming  It allows surprisingly expressive compile-time metaprogramming producing extremely efficient  robust and clean code  It took in lessons from functional programming almost a decade before C  got LINQ or lambda expressions   It allows you to catch a surprising number of errors at compile-time through static assertions and other metaprogramming tricks  which eases debugging vastly  and even beats unit tests in some ways   I d much rather catch an error at compile-time than afterwards  when I m running my tests    Deterministic destruction of variables allows RAII  an extremely powerful little trick that makes try finally blocks and C  s using blocks redundant   And while some people accuse it of being  design by committee   I d say yes  it is  and that s actually not a bad thing in this case  Look at Java s class library  How many classes have been deprecated again  How many should not be used  How many duplicate each others  functionality  How many are badly designed   C   s standard library is much smaller  but on the whole  it s remarkably well designed  and except for one or two minor warts  vector lt bool gt   for example   its design still holds up very well  When a feature is added to C   or its standard library  it is subjected to heavy scrutiny  Couldn t Java have benefited from the same   NET too  although it s younger and was somewhat better designed to begin with  is still accumulating a good handful of classes that are out of sync with reality  or were badly designed to begin with   C   has plenty of strengths that no other language can match  It s a good language

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Performance does matter

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Relational Databases are a waste of time  Use object databases instead   Relational database vendors try to fool us into believing that the only scaleable  persistent and safe storage in the world is relational databases  I am a certified DBA  Have you ever spent hours trying to optimize a query and had no idea what was going wrong  Relational databases don t let you make your own  search paths when you need them  You give away much of the control over the speed of your app into the hands of people you ve never met and they are not as smart as you think    Sure  sometimes in a well-maintained database they come up with a quick answer for a complex query  But the price you pay for this is too high  You have to choose between writing raw SQL every time you want to read an entry of your data  which is dangerous  Or use an Object relational mapper which adds more complexity and things outside your control    More importantly  you are actively forbidden from coming up with smart search algorithms  because every damn roundtrip to the database costs you around 11ms  It is too much  Imagine you know this super-graph algorithm which will answer a specific question  which might not even be expressible in SQL   in due time  But even if your algorithm is linear  and interesting algorithms are not linear  forget about combining it with a relational database as enumerating a large table will take you hours   Compare that with SandstoneDb  or Gemstone for Smalltalk  If you are into Java  give db4o a shot    So  my advice is  Use an object-DB  Sure  they aren t perfect and some queries will be slower  But you will be surprised how many will be faster  Because loading the objects will not require all these strange transofmations between SQL and your domain data  And if you really need speed for a certain query  object databases have the query optimizer you should trust  your brain

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Web services absolutely suck  and are not the way of the future   They are ridiculously inefficient and they don t guarantee ordered delivery   Web services should NEVER be used within a system where both client and server are being written   They are mostly useful for micky mouse mash-up type applications   They should definitely not be used for any kind of connection-oriented communication   This stance has gotten myself and colleagues into some very heated discussions  since web services is such a buzzy topic   Any project that mandates the use of web services is doomed because it is clearly already having ridiculous demands pushed down from management

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Microsoft Windows is the best platform for software development   Reasoning  Microsoft spoils its developers with excellent and cheap development tools  the platform and its API s are well documented  the platform is evolving at a rappid rate which creates a lot of opportunities for developers  The OS has a large user base which is important for obvious commercial reasons  there is a big community of Windows developers  I haven t yet been fired for choosing Microsoft

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Using Stored Procedures  Unless you are writing a large procedural function composed of non-reusable SQL queries  please move your stored procedures of the database and into version control

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Macros  Preprocessor instructions and Annotations are evil   One syntax and language per file please      does not apply to Make files  or editor macros that insert real code

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Goto is OK   is that controversial enough  Sometimes    so give us the choice  For example  BASH doesn t have goto  Maybe there is some internal reason for this but still  Also  goto is the building block of Assembly language  No if statements for you

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Controversial eh   I reckon the fact that C   streams use  lt  lt  and      I hate it   They are shift operators   Overloading them in this way is plain bad practice   It makes me want to kill whoever came up with that and thought it was a good idea   GRRR

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Never let best practices or pattern obsessesion slave you   These should be guidelines  not laws set in stone   And I really like the patterns  and the GoF book more or less says it that way too  stuff to browse through  providing a common jargon  Not a ball and chain gospel

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Procedural programming is fun  OOP is boring

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There are only 2 kinds of people who use C   C     Those who don t know any other language  and those who are too lazy to learn a new one

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Don t worry too much about what language to learn  use the industry heavy weights like c  or python  Languages like Ruby are fun in the bedroom  but don t do squat in workplace scenarios  Languages like c  and Java can handle small to the very large software projects  If anyone says otherwise  then your talking about a scripting language  Period   Before starting a project  consider how much support and code samples are available on the net  Again  choosing a language like Ruby which has very few code samples on the web compared to Java for example  will only cause you grief further down the road when your stuck on a problem   You can t post a message on a forum and expect an answer back while your boss is asking you how your coding is going  What are you going to say   I m waiting for someone to help me out on this forum   Learn one language and learn it good  Learning multiple languages may carry over skills and practices  but you ll only even be OK at all of them  Be good at one  There are entire books dedicated to Threading in Java which  when you think about it  is only one namespace out of over 100   Master one or be ok at lots

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Programmers take their  own little limited stupid  programming language as a sacrosanct religion   Its so funny how programmers take these discussions almost like religious believers do  no critics allowed   often  no objective discussion   very often  arguing based upon very limited  or absent knowledge and information  For a confirmation  just read the previous answers  and especially the comments   Also funny and another confirmation  by definition of the question  give me a controversial opinion   any controversion opinion should NOT qualify for negative votes - actually the opposite  the more controversial  the better  But how do our programmers react  like Pavlov s dogs  voting negative on disliked opinions   PS  I upvoted some others for fairness

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Estimates are for me  not for you  Estimates are a useful tool for me  as development line manager  to plan what my team is working on   They are not a promise of a feature s delivery on a specific date  and they are not a stick for driving the team to work harder   IMHO if you force developers to commit to estimates you get the safest possible figure   For instance -      I think a feature will probably take me around 5 days  There s a small chance of an issue that would make it take 30 days       If the estimates are just for planning then we ll all work to 5 days  and account for the small chance of an issue should it arise       However - if meeting that estimate is required as a promise of delivery what estimate do you think gets given    If a developer s bonus or job security depends on meeting an estimate do you think they give their most accurate guess or the one they re most certain they will meet   This opinion of mine is controversial with other management  and has been interpreted as me trying to worm my way out of having proper targets  or me trying to cover up poor performance  It s a tough sell every time  but one that I ve gotten used to making

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One class per file  Who cares  I much prefer entire programs contained in one file rather than a million different files

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There are far too many programmers who write far too much code

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Classes should fit on the screen   If you have to use the scroll bar to see all of your class  your class is too big     Code folding and miniature fonts are cheating

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You shouldn t settle on the first way you find to code something that  works    I really don t think this should be controversial  but it is   People see an example from elsewhere in the code  from online  or from some old  Teach yourself Advanced Power SQLJava BeansServer in 3 14159 minutes  book dated 1999  and they think they know something and they copy it into their code   They don t walk through the example to find out what each line does   They don t think about the design of their program and see if there might be a more organized or more natural way to do the same thing   They don t make any attempt at keeping their skill sets up to date to learn that they are using ideas and methods deprecated in the last year of the previous millenium   They don t seem to have the experience to learn that what they re copying has created specific horrific maintenance burdens for programmers for years and that they can be avoided with a little more thought   In fact  they don t even seem to recognize that there might be more than one way to do something   I come from the Perl world  where one of the slogans is  There s More Than One Way To Do It    TMTOWTDI   People who ve taken a cursory look at Perl have written it off as  write-only  or  unreadable   largely because they ve looked at crappy code written by people with the mindset I described above   Those people have given zero thought to design  maintainability  organization  reduction of duplication in code  coupling  cohesion  encapsulation  etc   They write crap   Those people exist programming in every language  and easy to learn languages with many ways to do things give them plenty of rope and guns to shoot and hang themselves with   Simultaneously   But if you hang around the Perl world for longer than a cursory look  and watch what the long-timers in the community are doing  you see a remarkable thing  the good Perl programmers spend some time seeking to find the best way to do something   When they re naming a new module  they ask around for suggestions and bounce their ideas off of people   They hand their code out to get looked at  critiqued  and modified   If they have to do something nasty  they encapsulate it in the smallest way possible in a module for use in a more organized way   Several implementations of the same idea might hang around for awhile  but they compete for mindshare and marketshare  and they compete by trying to do the best job  and a big part of that is by making themselves easily maintainable   Really good Perl programmers seem to think hard about what they are doing and looking for the best way to do things  rather than just grabbing the first idea that flits through their brain   Today I program primarily in the Java world   I ve seen some really good Java code  but I see a lot of junk as well  and I see more of the mindset I described at the beginning  people settle on the first ugly lump of code that seems to work  without understanding it  without thinking if there s a better way   You will see both mindsets in every language   I m not trying to impugn Java specifically    Actually I really like it in some ways     maybe that should be my real controversial opinion    But I m coming to believe that every programmer needs to spend a good couple of years with a TMTOWTDI-style language  because even though conventional wisdom has it that this leads to chaos and crappy code  it actually seems to produce people who understand that you need to think about the repercussions of what you are doing instead of trusting your language to have been designed to make you do the right thing with no effort   I do think you can err too far in the other direction  i e   perfectionism that totally ignores your true needs and goals  often the true needs and goals of your business  which is usually profitability    But I don t think anyone can be a truly great programmer without learning to invest some greater-than-average effort in thinking about finding the best  or at least one of the best  way to code what they are doing

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Cleanup and refactoring are very important in  team  development  A lot of work in team development has to do with management  If you are using a bug tracker than it is only useful if someone takes the time to close structure things and lower the amount of tickets  If you are using a source code management somebody needs to cleanup here and restructure the repository quite often  If you are programming than there should be people caring about refactoring of the lazy produced stuff of others  It is part of most of the aspects some will face while doing software development   Everybody agrees to the necessity of this kind of management  And it is always the first thing that is skipped

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It s ok to write garbage code once in a while  Sometimes a quick and dirty piece of garbage code is all that is needed to fulfill a particular task   Patterns  ORMs  SRP  whatever     Throw up a Console or Web App  write some inline sql   feels good    and blast out the requirement

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It s a good idea to keep optimisation in mind when developing code   Whenever I say this  people always reply   premature optimisation is the root of all evil    But I m not saying optimise before you debug   I m not even saying optimise ever  but when you re designing code  bear in mind the possibility that this might become a bottleneck  and write it so that it will be possible to refactor it for speed  without tearing the API apart   Hugo

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I think its fine to use goto-statements  if you use them in a sane way  and a sane programming language   They can often make your code a lot easier to read and don t force you to use some twisted logic just to get one simple thing done

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Haven t tested it yet for controversy  but there may be potential   The best line of code is the one you never wrote

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Assembly is the best first programming language

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C  or C    should be the first programming language  The first language should NOT be the easy one  it should be one that sets up the student s mind and prepare it for serious computer science  C is perfect for that  it forces students to think about memory and all the low level stuff  and at the same time they can learn how to structure their code  it has functions    C   has the added advantage that it really sucks    thus the students will understand why people had to come up with Java and C

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The word  evil  is an abused and overused word on Stackoverflow and simular forums    People who use it have too little imagination

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Respect the Single Responsibility Principle  At first glance you might not think this would be controversial  but in my experience when I mention to another developer that they shouldn t be doing everything in the page load method they often push back     so for the children please quit building the  do everything  method we see all to often

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Procedural programming is fun  OOP is boring

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What strikes me as amusing about this question is that I ve just read the first page of answers  and so far  I haven t found a single controversial opinion    Perhaps that says more about the way stackoverflow generates consensus than anything else  Maybe I should have started at the bottom   -

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1  The Business Apps farce   I think that the whole  Enterprise  frameworks thing is smoke and mirrors  J2EE   NET  the majority of the Apache frameworks and most abstractions to manage such things create far more complexity than they solve   Take any regular Java or  NET ORM  or any supposedly modern MVC framework for either which does  magic  to solve tedious  simple tasks  You end up writing huge amounts of ugly XML boilerplate that is difficult to validate and write quickly  You have massive APIs where half of those are just to integrate the work of the other APIs  interfaces that are impossible to recycle  and abstract classes that are needed only to overcome the inflexibility of Java and C   We simply don t need most of that   How about all the different application servers with their own darned descriptor syntax  the overly complex database and groupware products   The point of this is not that complexity  bad  it s that unnecessary complexity  bad  I ve worked in massive enterprise installations where some of it was necessary  but even in most cases a few home-grown scripts and a simple web frontend is all that s needed to solve most use cases   I d try to replace all of these enterprisey apps with simple web frameworks  open source DBs  and trivial programming constructs   2  The n-years-of-experience-required   Unless you need a consultant or a technician to handle a specific issue related to an application  API or framework  then you don t really need someone with 5 years of experience in that application  What you need is a developer admin who can read documentation  who has domain knowledge in whatever it is you re doing  and who can learn quickly  If you need to develop in some kind of language  a decent developer will pick it up in less than 2 months  If you need an administrator for X web server  in two days he should have read the man pages and newsgroups and be up to speed  Anything less and that person is not worth what he is paid   3  The common  computer science  degree curriculum   The majority of computer science and software engineering degrees are bull  If your first programming language is Java or C   then you re doing something wrong  If you don t get several courses full of algebra and math  it s wrong  If you don t delve into functional programming  it s incomplete  If you can t apply loop invariants to a trivial for loop  you re not worth your salt as a supposed computer scientist  If you come out with experience in x and y languages and object orientation  it s full of s     A real computer scientist sees a language in terms of the concepts and syntaxes it uses  and sees programming methodologies as one among many  and has such a good understanding of the underlying philosophies of both that picking new languages  design methods  or specification languages should be trivial

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Everything should be made as simple as possible  but not simpler   - Einstein

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If you re a developer  you should be able to write code  I did quite a bit of interviewing last year  and for my part of the interview I was supposed to test the way people thought  and how they implemented simple-to-moderate algorithms on a white board  I d initially started out with questions like      Given that Pi can be estimated using the function 4    1 - 1 3   1 5 - 1 7        with more terms giving greater accuracy  write a function that calculates Pi to an accuracy of 5 decimal places    It s a problem that should make you think  but shouldn t be out of reach to a seasoned developer  it can be answered in about 10 lines of C    However  many of our  supposedly pre-screened by the agency  candidates couldn t even begin to answer it  or even explain how they might go about answering it  So after a while I started asking simpler questions like      Given the area of a circle is given by Pi times the radius squared  write a function to calculate the area of a circle    Amazingly  more than half the candidates couldn t write this function in any language  I can read most popular languages so I let them use any language of their choice  including pseudo-code   We had  C  developers  who could not write this function in C    I was surprised by this  I had always thought that developers should be able to write code  It seems that  nowadays  this is a controversial opinion  Certainly it is amongst interview candidates     Edit   There s a lot of discussion in the comments about whether the first question is a good or bad one  and whether you should ask questions as complex as this in an interview  I m not going to delve into this here  that s a whole new question  apart from to say you re largely missing the point of the post    Yes  I said people couldn t make any headway with this  but the second question is trivial and many people couldn t make any headway with that one either  Anybody who calls themselves a developer should be able to write the answer to the second one in a few seconds without even thinking  And many can t

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Non-development staff should not be allowed to manage development staff   Correction  Staff with zero development experience should not be allowed to manage development staff

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There is no  one size fits all  approach to development  I m surprised that this is a controversial opinion  because it seems to me like common sense  However  there are many entries on popular blogs promoting the  one size fits all  approach to development so I think I may actually be in the minority   Things I ve seen being touted as the correct approach for any project - before any information is known about it - are things like the use of Test Driven Development  TDD   Domain Driven Design  DDD   Object-Relational Mapping  ORM   Agile  capital A   Object Orientation  OO   etc  etc  encompassing everything from methodologies to architectures to components  All with nice marketable acronyms  of course   People even seem to go as far as putting badges on their blogs such as  I m Test Driven  or similar  as if their strict adherence to a single approach whatever the details of the project project is actually a good thing    It isn t    Choosing the correct methodologies and architectures and components  etc   is something that should be done on a per-project basis  and depends not only on the type of project you re working on and its unique requirements  but also the size and ability of the team you re working with

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Tools  Methodology  Patterns  Frameworks  etc  are no substitute for a properly trained programmer  I m sick and tired of dealing with people  mostly managers  who think that the latest tool  methodology  pattern or framework is a silver bullet that will eliminate the need for hiring experienced developers to write their software   Although  as a consultant who makes a living rescuing at-risk projects  I shouldn t complain

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Requirements analysis  specification  design  and documentation will almost never fit into a  template    You are 100  of the time better off by starting with a blank document and beginning to type with a view of  I will explain this in such a way that if I were dead and someone else read this document  they would know everything that I know and see and understand now  and then organizing from there  letting section headings and such develop naturally and fit the task you are specifying  rather than being constrained to some business or school s idea of what your document should look like   If you have to do a diagram  rather than using somebody s formal and incomprehensible system  you re often better off just drawing a diagram that makes sense  with a clear legend  which actually specifies the system you are trying to specify and communicates the information that the developer on the other end  often you  after a few years  needs to receive    If you have to  once you ve written the real documentation  you can often shoehorn it into whatever template straightjacket your organization is imposing on you   You ll probably find yourself having to add section headings and duplicate material  though    The only time templates for these kinds of documents make sense is when you have a large number of tasks which are very similar in nature  differing only in details    Write a program to allow single-use remote login access through this modem bank  driving the terminal connection nexus with C-Kermit    Produce a historical trend and forecast report for capacity usage    Use this library to give all reports the ability to be faxed    Fix this code for the year 2000 problem   and  Add database triggers to this table to populate a software product provided for us by a third-party vendor  can not all be described by the same template  no matter what people may think   And for the record  the requirements and design diagramming techniques that my college classes attempted to teach me and my classmates could not be used to specify a simple calculator program  and everyone knew it

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Code as Design  Three Essays by Jack W  Reeves  The source code of any software is its most accurate design document  Everything else  specs  docs  and sometimes comments  is either incorrect  outdated or misleading   Guaranteed to get you fired pretty much everywhere

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Developers should be able to modify production code without getting permission from anyone as long as they document their changes and notify the appropriate parties

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Opinion  SQL is code   Treat it as such  That is  just like your C   Java  or other favorite object procedure language  develop a formatting style that is readable and maintainable     I hate when I see sloppy free-formatted SQL code   If you scream when you see both styles of curly braces on a page  why or why don t you scream when you see free formatted SQL or SQL that obscures or obfuscates the JOIN condition

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Design Patterns are a symptom of Stone Age programming language design  They have their purpose  A lot of good software gets built with them  But the fact that there was a need to codify these  recipes  for psychological abstractions about how your code works should work speaks to a lack of programming languages expressive enough to handle this abstraction for us    The remedy  I think  lies in languages that allow you to embed more and more of the design into the code  by defining language constructs that might not exist or might not have general applicability but really really make sense in situations your code deals with incessantly  The Scheme people have known this for years  and there are things possible with Scheme macros that would make most monkeys-for-hire piss their pants

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JavaScript is a  messy  language but god help me I love it

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Unnamed  tuples are evil   If you re using tuples as a container for several objects with unique meanings  use a class instead  If you re using them to hold several objects that should be accessible by index  use a list  If you re using them to return multiple values from a method  use Out parameters instead  this does require that your language supports pass-by-reference  If it s part of a code obfuscation strategy  keep using them    I see people using tuples just because they re too lazy to bother giving NAMES to their objects  Users of the API are then forced to access items in the tuple based on a meaningless index instead of a useful name

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Programmers should never touch Word  or PowerPoint   Unless you are developing a word or a document processing tool  you should not touch a Word processor that emits only binary blobs  and for that matter   Generated XML files are binary blobs  Programmers should write plain text documents  The documents a programmer writes need to convey intention only  not formatting  It must be producible with the programming tool-chain  editor  version-control  search utilities  build system and the like  When you are already have and know how to use that tool-chain  every other document production tool is a horrible waste of time and effort   When there is a need to produce a document for non-programmers  a lightweight markup language should be used such as reStructuredText  if you are writing a plain text file  you are probably writing your own lightweight markup anyway   and generate HTML  PDF  S5  etc  from it

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For a good programmer language is not a problem   It may be not very controvertial but I hear a lot o whining from other programmers like  why don t they all use delphi     C  sucks    i would change company if they forced me to use java  and so on  What i think is that a good programmer is flexible and is able to write good programms in any programming language that he might have to learn in his life

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I hate universities and institutes offering short courses for teaching programming to new comers  It is outright disgrace and contempt for the art1 and science of programming    They start teaching C  Java  VB  disgusting  to the people without good grasp on hardware and fundamental principals of computers  The should first be taught about the MACHINE by books like Morris Mano s Computer System Architecture and then taught the concept of instructing machine to solve problems instead of etching semantics and syntax of one programming language   Also I don t understand government schools  colleges teaching children basics of computers using commercial operating systems and softwares  At least in my country  India  not many students afford to buy operating systems and even discounted office suits let alone the development software  juggernaut  compilers  IDEs etc   This prompts theft and piracy and make this act of copying and stealing software from their institutes  libraries a justified act   Again they are taught to use some products not the fundamental ideas   Think about it if you were taught only that 2x2 is 4 and not the concept of multiplication   Or if you were taught now to measure the length of pole inclined to some compound wall of your school but not the Pythagoras theorem

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Software development is just a job  Don t get me wrong  I enjoy software development a lot  I ve written a blog for the last few years on the subject  I ve spent enough time on here to have  5000 reputation points  And I work in a start-up doing typically 60 hour weeks for much less money than I could get as a contractor because the team is fantastic and the work is interesting   But in the grand scheme of things  it is just a job   It ranks in importance below many things such as family  my girlfriend  friends  happiness etc   and below other things I d rather be doing if I had an unlimited supply of cash such as riding motorbikes  sailing yachts  or snowboarding   I think sometimes a lot of developers forget that developing is just something that allows us to have the more important things in life  and to have them by doing something we enjoy  rather than being the end goal in itself

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Don t comment your code  Comments are not code and therefore when things change it s very easy to not change the comment that explained the code   Instead I prefer to refactor the crap out of code to a point that there is no reason for a comment   An example   if data    null      First time on the page   to   bool firstTimeOnPage   data    null  if firstTimeOnPage    The only time I really comment is when it s a TODO or explaining why  Widget GetData       only way to grab data  TODO  extract interface or wrapper

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All source code and comments should be written in English  Writing source code and or comments in languages other than English makes it less reusable and more difficult to debug if you don t understand the language they are written in   Same goes for SQL tables  views  and columns  especially when abbrevations are used  If they aren t abbreviated  I might be able to translate the table column name on-line  but if they re abbreviated all I can do is SELECT and try to decipher the results

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Programmers should avoid method hiding through inheritance at all costs   In my experience  virtually every place I have ever seen inherited method hiding used it has caused problems  Method hiding results in objects behaving differently when accessed through a base type reference vs  a derived type reference - this is generally a Bad Thing  While many programmers are not formally aware of it  most intuitively expect that objects will adhere to the Liskov Substitution Principle  When objects violate this expectation  many of the assumptions inherent to object-oriented systems can begin to fray  The most egregious cases I ve seen is when the hidden method alters the state of the object instance  In these cases  the behavior of the object can change in subtle ways that are difficult to debug and diagnose   Ok  so there may be some infrequent cases where method hiding is actually useful and beneficial - like emulating return type covariance of methods in languages that don t support it  But the vast majority of time  when developers use method hiding it is either out of ignorance  or accident  or as a way to hack around some problem that probably deserves better design treatment  In general  the beneficial cases I ve seen of method hiding  not to say there aren t others  is when a side-effect free method that returns some information is hidden by one that computes something more applicable to the calling context   Languages like C  have improved things a bit by requiring the new keyword on methods that hide a base class method - at least helping avoid involuntary use of method hiding  But I find that many people still confuse the meaning of new with that of override - particularly since in simple scenarios their behavior can appear identical  It would be nice if tools like FxCop actually had built-in rules for identifying potentially bad usage of method hiding   By the way  method hiding through inheritance should not be confused with other kinds of hiding - such as through nesting - which I believe is a valid and useful construct with fewer potential problems

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Software engineers should not work with computer science guys  Their differences   SEs care about code reusability  while CSs just suss out code SEs care about performance  while CSs just want to have things done now SEs care about whole structure  while CSs do not give a toss

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The ability to create UML diagrams similar to pretzels with mad cow disease is not actually a useful software development skill   The whole point of diagramming code is to visualise connections  to see the shape of a design  But once you pass a certain rather low level of complexity  the visualisation is too much to process mentally  Making connections pictorially is only simple if you stick to straight lines  which typically makes the diagram much harder to read than if the connections were cleverly grouped and routed along the cardinal directions   Use diagrams only for broad communication purposes  and only when they re understood to be lies

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That software can be bug free if you have the right tools and take the time to write it properly

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Once i saw the following from a co-worker   equal   a CompareTo b     0   I stated that he cannot assume that in a general case  but he just laughed

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Two lines of code is too many   If a method has a second line of code  it is a code smell   Refactor

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Tcl Tk is the best GUI language toolkit combo ever  It may lack specific widgets and be less good-looking than the new kids on the block  but its model is elegant and so easy to use that one can build working GUIs faster by typing commands interactively than by using a visual interface builder  Its expressive power is unbeatable  other solutions  Gtk  Java   NET  MFC     typically require ten to one hundred LOC to get the same result as a Tcl Tk one-liner  All without even sacrificing readability or stability   pack  label  l -text  Hello world     button  b -text  Quit  -command exit

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Not everything needs to be encapsulated into its own method  Some times it is ok to have a method do more then one thing

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Print statements are a valid way to debug code  I believe it is perfectly fine to debug your code by littering it with System out println  or whatever print statement works for your language    Often  this can be quicker than debugging  and you can compare printed outputs against other runs of the app   Just make sure to remove the print statements when you go to production  or better  turn them into logging statements

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Exceptions considered harmful

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MVC for the web should be far simpler than traditional MVC     Traditional MVC involves code that  listens  for  events  so that the view can continually be updated to reflect the current state of the model   In the web paradigm however  the web server already does the listening  and the request is the event   Therefore MVC for the web need only be a specific instance of the mediator pattern  controllers mediating between views and the model   If a web framework is crafted properly  a re-usable core should probably not be more than 100 lines   That core need only implement the  page controller  paradigm but should be extensible so as to be able to support the  front controller  paradigm   Below is a method that is the crux of my own framework  used successfully in an embedded consumer device manufactured by a Fortune 100 network hardware manufacturer  for a Fortune 50 media company   My approach has been likened to Smalltalk by a former Smalltalk programmer and author of an Oreilly book about the most prominent Java web framework ever  furthermore I have ported the same framework to mod python psp   static function sendResponse IBareBonesController  controller       controller- gt setMto  controller- gt applyInputToModel        controller- gt mto- gt applyModelToView

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Xah Lee  actually has some pretty noteworthy and legitimate viewpoints if you can filter out all the invective  and rationally evaluate statements without agreeing  or disagreeing  based solely on the personality behind the statements  A lot of my  controversial  viewpoints have been echoed by him  and other notorious  trolls  who have criticized languages or tools I use d  on a regular basis   Documentation Generators  http   en wikipedia or  wiki Comparison of documentation generators       the kind where the creator invented some custom-made especially-for-documenting-sourcecode roll-your-own syntax  including  but not limited to JavaDoc  are totally superfluous and a waste of time because    1  They are underused by the people who should be using them the most  and 2  All of these mini-documentation-languages all of them could easily be replaced with YAML

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Never implement anything as a singleton   You can decide not to construct more than one instance  but always ensure you implementation can handle more   I have yet to find any scenario where using a singleton  is actually the right thing to do   I got into some very heated discussions over this in the last few years  but in the end I was always right

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Good architecture is grown  not designed   Managers should make sure their team members always work below their state of the art  whatever that level is  When people work withing their comfort zone they produce higher quality code

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Here s mine    You don t need  textual  syntax to express objects and their behavior    I subscribe to the ideas of Jonathan Edwards and his Subtext project - http   alarmingdevelopment org

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Associative Arrays   Hash Maps   Hash Tables   whatever its called in your favourite language  are the best thing since sliced bread   Sure  they provide fast lookup from key to value  But they also make it easy to construct structured data on the fly  In scripting languages its often the only  or at least most used  way to represent structured data   IMHO they were a very important factor for the success of many scripting languages   And even in C   std  map and std  tr1  unordered map helped me writing code faster

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Arrays should by default be 1-based rather than 0-based   This is not necessarily the case with system implementation languages  but languages like Java swallowed more C oddities than they should have    Element 1  should be the first element  not the second  to avoid confusion   Computer science is not software development   You wouldn t hire an engineer who studied only physics  after all   Learn as much mathematics as is feasible   You won t use most of it  but you need to be able to think that way to be good at software   The single best programming language yet standardized is Common Lisp  even if it is verbose and has zero-based arrays   That comes largely from being designed as a way to write computations  rather than as an abstraction of a von Neumann machine   At least 90  of all comparative criticism of programming languages can be reduced to  Language A has feature C  and I don t know how to do C or something equivalent in Language B  so Language A is better     Best practices  is the most impressive way to spell  mediocrity  I ve ever seen

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JavaScript is a  messy  language but god help me I love it

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I ve been burned for broadcasting these opinions in public before  but here goes   Well-written code in dynamically typed languages follows static-typing conventions  Having used Python  PHP  Perl  and a few other dynamically typed languages  I find that well-written code in these languages follows static typing conventions  for example    Its considered bad style to re-use a variable with different types  for example  its bad style to take a list variable and assign an int  then assign the variable a bool in the same method   Well-written code in dynamically typed languages doesn t mix types  A type-error in a statically typed language is still a type-error in a dynamically typed language  Functions are generally designed to operate on a single datatype at a time  so that a function which accepts a parameter of type T can only sensibly be used with objects of type T or subclasses of T  Functions designed to operator on many different datatypes are written in a way that constrains parameters to a well-defined interface  In general terms  if two objects of types A and B perform a similar function  but aren t subclasses of one another  then they almost certainly implement the same interface    While dynamically typed languages certainly provide more than one way to crack a nut  most well-written  idiomatic code in these languages pays close attention to types just as rigorously as code written in statically typed languages   Dynamic typing does not reduce the amount of code programmers need to write  When I point out how peculiar it is that so many static-typing conventions cross over into dynamic typing world  I usually add  so why use dynamically typed languages to begin with     The immediate response is something along the lines of being able to write more terse  expressive code  because dynamic typing allows programmers to omit type annotations and explicitly defined interfaces  However  I think the most popular statically typed languages  such as C   Java  and Delphi  are bulky by design  not as a result of their type systems   I like to use languages with a real type system like OCaml  which is not only statically typed  but its type inference and structural typing allow programmers to omit most type annotations and interface definitions   The existence of the ML family of languages demostrates that we can enjoy the benefits of static typing with all the brevity of writing in a dynamically typed language  I actually use OCaml s REPL for ad hoc  throwaway scripts in exactly the same way everyone else uses Perl or Python as a scripting language

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Size matters  Embellish your code so it looks bigger

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SQL could and should have been done better   Because its original spec was limited  various venders have been extending the language in different directions for years   SQL that is written for MS-SQL is different than SQL for Oracle  IBM  MySQL  Sybase  etc   Other serious languages  take C   for example  were carefully standardized so that C   written under one compiler will generally compile unmodified under another   Why couldn t SQL have been designed and standardized better   HTML was a seriously broken choice as a browser display language   We ve spent years extending it through CSS  XHTML  Javascript  Ajax  Flash  etc  in order to make a useable UI  and the result is still not as good as your basic thick-client windows app   Plus  a competent web programmer now needs to know three or four languages in order to make a decent UI   Oh yeah   Hungarian notation is an abomination

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It s a good idea to keep optimisation in mind when developing code   Whenever I say this  people always reply   premature optimisation is the root of all evil    But I m not saying optimise before you debug   I m not even saying optimise ever  but when you re designing code  bear in mind the possibility that this might become a bottleneck  and write it so that it will be possible to refactor it for speed  without tearing the API apart   Hugo

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It s ok to write garbage code once in a while  Sometimes a quick and dirty piece of garbage code is all that is needed to fulfill a particular task   Patterns  ORMs  SRP  whatever     Throw up a Console or Web App  write some inline sql   feels good    and blast out the requirement

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Two brains think better than one  I firmly believe that pair programming is the number one factor when it comes to increasing code quality and programming productivity  Unfortunatly it is also a highly controversial for management who believes that  more hands    more code

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There is a difference between a programmer and a developer   An example  a programmer writes pagination logic  a developer integrates pagination on a page

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Most consulting programmers suck and should not be allowed to write production code   IMHO-Probably about 60  or more

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I think we should move away from  C   Its too old   But  the old dog is still barking louder

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Never implement anything as a singleton   You can decide not to construct more than one instance  but always ensure you implementation can handle more   I have yet to find any scenario where using a singleton  is actually the right thing to do   I got into some very heated discussions over this in the last few years  but in the end I was always right

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A random collection of Cook s aphorisms      The hardest language to learn is your second  The hardest OS to learn is your second one - especially if your first was an IBM mainframe  Once you ve learned several seemingly different languages  you finally realize that all programming languages are the same - just minor differences in syntax  Although one can be quite productive and marketable without having learned any assembly  no one will ever have a visceral understanding of computing without it  Debuggers are the final refuge for programmers who don t really know what they re doing in the first place  No OS will ever be stable if it doesn t make use of hardware memory management  Low level systems programming is much  much easier than applications programming  The programmer who has a favorite language is just playing  Write the User s Guide FIRST  Policy and procedure are intended for those who lack the initiative to perform otherwise   The Contractor s Creed   Tell em what they need  Give em what they want  Make sure the check clears  If you don t find programming fun  get out of it or accept that although you may make a living at it  you ll never be more than average  Just as the old farts have to learn the  NET method names  you ll have to learn the library calls   But there s nothing new there  The life of a programmer is one of constantly adapting to different environments  and the more tools you have hung on your belt  the more versatile and marketable you ll be  You may piddle around a bit with little code chunks near the beginning to try out some ideas  but  in general  one doesn t start coding in earnest until you KNOW how the whole program or app is going to be layed out  and you KNOW that the whole thing is going to work EXACTLY as advertised   For most projects with at least some degree of complexity  I generally end up spending 60 to 70 percent of the time up front just percolating ideas  Understand that programming has little to do with language and everything to do with algorithm  All of those nifty geegaws with memorable acronyms that folks have come up with over the years are just different ways of skinning the implementation cat   When you strip away all the OOPiness  RADology  Development Methodology 37  and Best Practice 42  you still have to deal with the basic building blocks of    assignments conditionals iterations control flow I O    Once you can truly wrap yourself around that  you ll eventually get to the point where you see  from a programming standpoint  little difference between writing an inventory app for an auto parts company  a graphical real-time TCP performance analyzer  a mathematical model of a stellar core  or an appointments calendar    Beginning programmers work with small chunks of code   As they gain experience  they work with ever increasingly large chunks of code  As they gain even more experience  they work with small chunks of code

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Functional programming is NOT more intuitive or easier to learn than imperative programming   There are many good things about functional programming  but I often hear functional programmers say it s easier to understand functional programming than imperative programming for people with no programming experience  From what I ve seen it s the opposite  people find trivial problems hard to solve because they don t get how to manage and reuse their temporary results when you end up in a world without state

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Java is the COBOL of our generation   Everyone learns to code it  There code for it running in big companies that will try to keep it running for decades  Everyone comes to despise it compared to all the other choices out there but are forced to use it anyway because it pays the bills

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Copy Pasting is not an antipattern  it fact it helps with not making more bugs  My rule of thumb - typing only something that cannot be copy pasted  If creating similar method  class  or file - copy existing one and change what s needed   I am not talking about duplicating a code that should have been put into a single method    I usually never even type variable names - either copy pasting them or using IDE autocompletion  If need some DAO method - copying similar one and changing what s needed  even if 90  will be changed   May look like extreme laziness or lack of knowledge to some  but I almost never have to deal with problems caused my misspelling something trivial  and they are usually tough to catch  if not detected on a compile level     Whenever I step away from my copy-pasting rule and start typing stuff I always misspelling something  it s just a statistics  nobody can write perfect text off the bat  and then spending more time trying to figure out where

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The worst thing about recursion is recursion

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Sometimes jumping on the bandwagon is ok  I get tired of people exhibiting  grandpa syndrome    You kids and your newfangled Test Driven Development   Every big technology that s come out in the last decade has sucked   Back in my day  we wrote real code      you get the idea    Sometimes things that are popular are popular for a reason

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Cleanup and refactoring are very important in  team  development  A lot of work in team development has to do with management  If you are using a bug tracker than it is only useful if someone takes the time to close structure things and lower the amount of tickets  If you are using a source code management somebody needs to cleanup here and restructure the repository quite often  If you are programming than there should be people caring about refactoring of the lazy produced stuff of others  It is part of most of the aspects some will face while doing software development   Everybody agrees to the necessity of this kind of management  And it is always the first thing that is skipped

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Readability is the most important aspect of your code   Even more so than correctness   If it s readable  it s easy to fix   It s also easy to optimize  easy to change  easy to understand   And hopefully other developers can learn something from it too

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Opinion  developers should be testing their own code  I ve seen too much crap handed off to test only to have it not actually fix the bug in question  incurring communication overhead and fostering irresponsible practices

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I think its fine to use goto-statements  if you use them in a sane way  and a sane programming language   They can often make your code a lot easier to read and don t force you to use some twisted logic just to get one simple thing done

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The best code is often the code you don t write   As programmers we want to solve every problem by writing some cool method   Anytime we can solve a problem and still give the users 80  of what they want without introducing more code to maintain and test we have provided waaaay more value

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New web projects should consider not using Java   I ve been using Java to do web development for over 10 years now   At first  it was a step in the right direction compared to the available alternatives   Now  there are better alternatives than Java   This is really just a specific case of the magic hammer approach to problem solving  but it s one that s really painful

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If a developer cannot write clear  concise and grammatically correct comments then they should have to go back and take English 101     We have developers and  the horror  architects who cannot write coherently   When their documents are reviewed they say things like  oh  don t worry about grammatical errors or spelling - that s not important    Then they wonder why their convoluted garbage documents become convoluted buggy code   I tell the interns that I mentor that if you can t communicate your great ideas verbally or in writing you may as well not have them

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Detailed designs are a waste of time  and if an engineer needs them in order to do a decent job  then it s not worth employing them   OK  so a couple of ideas are thrown together here    1  the old idea of waterfall development where you supposedly did all your design up front  resulting in some glorified extremely detailed class diagrams  sequence diagrams etc  etc   was a complete waste of time   As I once said to a colleague  I ll be done with design once the code is finished   Which I think is what agile is partly a recognition of - that the code is the design  and that any decent developer is continually refactoring   This of course  makes the idea that your class diagrams are out of date laughable - they always will be   2  management often thinks that you can usefully take a poor engineer and use them as a  code monkey  - in other words they re not particularly talented  but heck - can t you use them to write some code   Well   no  If you have to spend so much time writing detailed specs that you re basically specifying the code  then it will be quicker to write it yourself   You re not saving any time   If a developer isn t smart enough to use their own imagination and judgement they re not worth employing   Note  I m not talking about junior engineers who are able to learn  Plenty of  senior engineers  fall into this category

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System Data DataSet Rocks   Strongly-typed DataSets are better  in my opinion  than custom DDD objects for most business applications   Reasoning  We re bending over backwards to figure out Unit of Work on custom objects  LINQ to SQL  Entity Framework and it s adding complexity  Use a nice code generator from somewhere to generate the data layer and the Unit of Work sits on the object collections  DataTable and DataSet --no mystery

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Agile    sucks

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QA should know the code  indirectly  better than development  QA gets paid to find things development didn t intend to happen  and they often do      Btw  I m a developer who just values good QA guys a whole bunch -- far to few of them    far to few

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I fail to understand why people think that Java is absolutely the best  first  programming language to be taught in universities    For one  I believe that first programming language should be such that it highlights the need to learn control flow and variables  not objects and syntax  For another  I believe that people who have not had experience in debugging memory leaks in C   C   cannot fully appreciate what Java brings to the table   Also the natural progression should be from  how can I do this  to  how can I find the library which does that  and not the other way round

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A picture is not worth a thousand words   Some pictures might be worth a thousand words   Most of them are not   This trite old aphorism is mostly untrue and is a pathetic excuse for many a lazy manager who did not want to read carefully created reports and documentation to say  I need you to show me in a diagram    My wife studied for a linguistics major and saw several fascinating proofs against the conventional wisdom on pictures and logos  they do not break across language and cultural barriers  they usually do not communicate anywhere near as much information as correct text  they simply are no substitute for real communication   In particular  labeled bubbles connected with lines are useless if the lines are unlabeled and unexplained  and or if every line has a different meaning instead of signifying the same relationship  unless distinguished from each other in some way    If your lines sometimes signify relationships and sometimes indicate actions and sometimes indicate the passage of time  you re really hosed   Every good programmer knows you use the tool suited for the job at hand  right   Not all systems are best specified and documented in pictures   Graphical specification languages that can be automatically turned into provably-correct  executable code or whatever are a spectacular idea  if such things exist   Use them when appropriate  not for everything under the sun   Entity-Relationship diagrams are great   But not everything can be summed up in a picture   Note  a table may be worth its weight in gold   But a table is not the same thing as a picture   And again  a well-crafted short prose paragraph may be far more suitable for the job at hand

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There are only 2 kinds of people who use C   C     Those who don t know any other language  and those who are too lazy to learn a new one

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Avoid indentation    Use early returns  continues or breaks   instead of   if  passed    NULL       for x in list             if  peter                    print  peter             more code                                          else                   print  no peter                     do   if  pPassed  NULL      return false   for x in list       if   peter              print  no peter           continue           print  peter      more code

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Using regexs to parse HTML is  in many cases   fine  Every time someone posts a question on Stack Overflow asking how to achieve some HTML manuipulation with a regex  the first answer is  Regex is a insufficient tool to parse HTML so don t do it   If the questioner was trying to build a web browser  this would be a helpful answer  However  usually the questioner wants to do some thing like add a rel tag to all the links to a certain domain  usually in a case when certain assumptions can be made about the style of the incoming markup  something that is entiely reasonable to do with a regex

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To produce great software  you need domain specialists as much as good developers

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Extension Methods are the work of the Devil  Everyone seems to think that extension methods in  Net are the best thing since sliced bread  The number of developers singing their praises seems to rise by the minute but I m afraid I can t help but despise them and unless someone can come up with a brilliant justification or example that I haven t already heard then I will never write one  I recently came across this thread and I must say reading the examples of the highest voted extensions made me feel a little like vomiting  metaphorically of course    The main reasons given for their extensiony goodness are increased readability  improved OO-ness and the ability to chain method calls better   I m afraid I have to differ  I find in fact that they  unequivocally  reduce readability and OO-ness by virtue of the fact that they are at their core a lie  If you need a utility method that acts upon an object then write a utility method that acts on that object don t lie to me  When I see aString SortMeBackwardsUsingKlingonSortOrder then string should have that method because that is telling me something about the string object not something about the AnnoyingNerdReferences StringUtilities class   LINQ was designed in such a way that chained method calls are necessary to avoid strange and uncomfortable expressions and the extension methods that arise from LINQ are understandable but in general chained method calls reduce readability and lead to code of the sort we see in obfuscated Perl contests   So  in short  extension methods are evil  Cast off the chains of Satan and commit yourself to extension free code

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Separation of concerns is evil     Only separate concerns if you have good reason for it  Otherwise  don t separate them   I have encountered too many occasions of separation only for the sake of separation  The second half of Dijkstra s statement  Minimal coupling  maximal cohesion  should not be forgotten      Happy to discuss this further

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The use of hungarian notation should be punished with death    That should be controversial enough

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That software can be bug free if you have the right tools and take the time to write it properly

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Sometimes it s appropriate to swallow an exception   For UI bells and wistles  prompting the user with an error message is interuptive  and there is ussually nothing for them to do anyway   In this case  I just log it  and deal with it when it shows up in the logs

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Web services absolutely suck  and are not the way of the future   They are ridiculously inefficient and they don t guarantee ordered delivery   Web services should NEVER be used within a system where both client and server are being written   They are mostly useful for micky mouse mash-up type applications   They should definitely not be used for any kind of connection-oriented communication   This stance has gotten myself and colleagues into some very heated discussions  since web services is such a buzzy topic   Any project that mandates the use of web services is doomed because it is clearly already having ridiculous demands pushed down from management

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Respect the Single Responsibility Principle  At first glance you might not think this would be controversial  but in my experience when I mention to another developer that they shouldn t be doing everything in the page load method they often push back     so for the children please quit building the  do everything  method we see all to often

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Opinion  Duration in the development field does not always mean the same as experience   Many trades look at  years of experience  in a language   Yes  5 years of C  can make sense since you may learn new tricks and what not  However  if you are with the company and maintaining the same code base for a number of years  I feel as if you are not gaining the amount of exposure to different situations as a person who works on different situations and client needs     I once interviewed a person who prided himself on having 10 years of programming experience and worked with VB5  6  and VB Net   all in the same company during that time   After more probing  I found out that while he worked with all of those versions of VB  he was only upgrading and constantly maintaining his original VB5 app   Never modified the architecture and let the upgrade wizards do their thing   I have interviewed people who only have 2 years in the field but have worked on multiple projects that have more  experience  than him

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Developers are all different  and should be treated as such   Developers don t fit into a box  and shouldn t be treated as such  The best language or tool for solving a problem has just as much to do with the developers as it does with the details of the problem being solved

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Opinion  That frameworks and third part components should be only used as a last resort   I often see programmers immediately pick a framework to accomplish a task without learning the underlying approach it takes to work   Something will inevitably break  or we ll find a limition we didn t account for and we ll be immediately stuck and have to rethink major part of a system   Frameworks are fine to use as long it is carefully thought out

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Coding is an Art  Some people think coding is an art  and others think coding is a science   The  science  faction argues that as the target is to obtain the optimal code for a situation  then coding is the science of studying how to obtain this optimal   The  art  faction argues there are many ways to obtain the optimal code for a situation  the process is full of subjectivity  and that to choose wisely based on your own skills and experience is an art

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If it s not native  it s not really programming  By definition  a program is an entity that is run by the computer   It talks directly to the CPU and the OS   Code that does not talk directly to the CPU and the OS  but is instead run by some other program that does talk directly to the CPU and the OS  is not a program  it s a script   This was just simple common sense  completely non-controversial  back before Java came out  Suddenly there was a scripting language with a large enough feature set to accomplish tasks that had previously been exclusively the domain of programs   In response  Microsoft developed the  NET framework and some scripting languages to run on it  and managed to muddy the waters further by slowly reducing support for true programming among their development tools in favor of  NET scripting   Even though it can accomplish a lot of things that you previously had to write programs for  managed code of any variety is still scripting  not programming  and  programs  written in it do and always will share the performance characteristics of scripts  they run more slowly and use up far more RAM than a real  native  program would take to accomplish the same task   People calling it programming are doing everyone a disservice by dumbing down the definition   It leads to lower quality across the board   If you try and make programming so easy that any idiot can do it  what you end up with are a whole lot of idiots who think they can program

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Opinion  most code out there is crappy  because that s what the programmers WANT it to be   Indirectly  we have been nurturing a culture of extreme creativeness  It s not that I don t think problem solving has creative elements -- it does -- it s just that it s not even remotely the same as something like painting  see Paul Graham s famous  Hackers and Painters  essay     If we bend our industry towards that approach  ultimately it means letting every programmer go forth and whack out whatever highly creative  crazy stuff they want  Of course  for any sizable project  trying to put together dozens of unrelated  unstructured  unplanned bits into one final coherent bit won t work by definition  That s not a guess  or an estimate  it s the state of the industry that we face today  How many times have you seen sub-bits of functionality in a major program that were completely inconsistent with the rest of the code  It s so common now  it s a wonder anyone cause use any of these messes    Convoluted  complicated  ugly stuff that just keeps getting worse and more unstable  If we were building something physical  everyone on the planet would call us out on how horribly ugly and screwed up the stuff is  but because it more or less hidden by being virtual  we are able to get away with some of the worst manufacturing processing that our species will ever see   Can you imagine a car where four different people designed the four different wheels  in four different ways    But the sad part  the controversial part of it all  is that there is absolutely NO reason for it to be this way  other than historically the culture was towards more freedom and less organization  so we stayed that way  and probably got a lot worse   Software development is a joke  but it s a joke because that s what the programmers want it to be  but would never in a million years admit that it was true  a  plot by management  is a better reason for most people     How long will we keep shooting ourselves in the foot  before we wake up and realize that we the ones holding the gun  pointing it and also pulling the trigger   Paul

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I firmly believe that unmanaged code isn t worth the trouble   The extra maintainability expenses associated with hunting down memory leaks which even the best programmers introduce occasionally far outweigh the performance to be gained from a language like C     If Java  C   etc  can t get the performance you need  buy more machines

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Don t use stored procs in your database   The reasons they were originally good - security  abstraction  single connection - can all be done in your middle tier with ORMs that integrate lots of other advantages   This one is definitely controversial   Every time I bring it up  people tear me apart

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Primitive data types are premature optimization   There are languages that get by with just one data type  the scalar  and they do just fine   Other languages are not so fortunate   Developers just throw  int  and  double  in because they have to write in something   What s important is not how big the data types are  but what the data is used for   If you have a day of the month variable  it doesn t matter much if it s signed or unsigned  or whether it s char  short  int  long  long long  float  double  or long double   It does matter that it s a day of the month  and not a month  or day of week  or whatever   See Joel s column on making things that are wrong look wrong  Hungarian notation as originally proposed was a Good Idea   As used in practice  it s mostly useless  because it says the wrong thing

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Pagination is never what the user wants  If you start having the discussion about where to do pagination  in the database  in the business logic  on the client  etc  then you are asking the wrong question  If your app is giving back more data than the user needs  figure out a way for the user to narrow down what they need based on real criteria  not arbitrary sized chunks  And if the user really does want all those results  then give them all the results  Who are you helping by giving back 20 at a time  The server  Is that more important than your user    EDIT  clarification  based on comments    As a real world example  let s look at this Stack Overflow question   Let s say I have a controversial programming opinion   Before I post  I d like to see if there is already an answer that addresses the same opinion  so I can upvote it   The only option I have is to click through every page of answers   I would prefer one of these options    Allow me to search through the answers  a way for me to narrow down what I need based on real criteria   Allow me to see all the answers so I can use my browser s  find  option  give me all the results     The same applies if I just want to find an answer I previously read  but can t find anymore   I don t know when it was posted or how many votes it has  so the sorting options don t help   And even if I did  I still have to play a guessing game to find the right page of results  The fact that the answers are paginated and I can directly click into one of a dozen pages is no help at all   -- bmb

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I believe in the Zen of Python

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That  at least during initial design   every Database Table  well  almost every one  should be clearly defined to contain some clearly understanable business entity or system-level domain abstraction  and that whether or not you use it as a a primary key and as Foreign Keys in other dependant tables  some column  attribute  or subset of the table attributes should be clearly defined to represent a unique key for that table  entity abstraction    This is the only way to ensure that the overall table structure represents a logically consistent representation of the complete system data structure  without overlap or misunbderstood flattening   I am a firm believeer in using non-meaningful surrogate keys for Pks and Fks and join functionality   for performance  ease of use  and other reasons   but I beleive the tendency in this direction has taken the database community too far away from the original Cobb principles  and we jhave lost much of the benefits  of database consistency  that natural keys provided     So why not use both

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The class library guidelines for implementing IDisposable are wrong   I don t share this too often  but I believe that the guidance for the default implementation for IDisposable is completely wrong   My issue isn t with the overload of Dispose and then removing the item from finalization  but rather  I despise how there is a call to release the managed resources in the finalizer   I personally believe that an exception should be thrown  and yes  with all the nastiness that comes from throwing it on the finalizer thread    The reasoning behind it is that if you are a client or server of IDisposable  there is an understanding that you can t simply leave the object lying around to be finalized   If you do  this is a design implementation flaw  depending on how it is left lying around  and or how it is exposed   as you are not aware of the lifetime of instances that you should be aware of   I think that this type of bug error is on the level of race conditions synchronization to resources   Unfortunately  with calling the overload of Dispose  that error is never materialized   Edit   I ve written a blog post on the subject if anyone is interested   http   www caspershouse com post A-Better-Implementation-Pattern-for-IDisposable aspx

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Your job is to put yourself out of work   When you re writing software for your employer  any software that you create is to be written in such a way that it can be picked up by any developer and understood with a minimal amount of effort  It is well designed  clearly and consistently written  formatted cleanly  documented where it needs to be  builds daily as expected  checked into the repository  and appropriately versioned    If you get hit by a bus  laid off  fired  or walk off the job  your employer should be able to replace you on a moment s notice  and the next guy could step into your role  pick up your code and be up and running within a week tops  If he or she can t do that  then you ve failed miserably   Interestingly  I ve found that having that goal has made me more valuable to my employers  The more I strive to be disposable  the more valuable I become to them

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Uncommented code is the bane of humanity   I think that comments are necessary for code   They visually divide it up into logical parts  and provide an alternative representation when reading code   Documentation comments are the bare minimum  but using comments to split up longer functions helps when writing new code and allows quicker analysis when returning to existing code

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That  at least during initial design   every Database Table  well  almost every one  should be clearly defined to contain some clearly understanable business entity or system-level domain abstraction  and that whether or not you use it as a a primary key and as Foreign Keys in other dependant tables  some column  attribute  or subset of the table attributes should be clearly defined to represent a unique key for that table  entity abstraction    This is the only way to ensure that the overall table structure represents a logically consistent representation of the complete system data structure  without overlap or misunbderstood flattening   I am a firm believeer in using non-meaningful surrogate keys for Pks and Fks and join functionality   for performance  ease of use  and other reasons   but I beleive the tendency in this direction has taken the database community too far away from the original Cobb principles  and we jhave lost much of the benefits  of database consistency  that natural keys provided     So why not use both

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To Be A Good Programmer really requires working in multiple aspects of the field   Application development  Systems  Kernel  work  User Interface Design  Database  and so on   There are certain approaches common to all  and certain approaches that are specific to one aspect of the job   You need to learn how to program Java like a Java coder  not like a C   coder and vice versa   User Interface design is really hard  and uses a different part of your brain than coding  but implementing that UI in code is yet another skill as well   It is not just that there is no  one  approach to coding  but there is not just one type of coding

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You can t write a web application without a remote debugger  Web applications typically tie together interactions between multiple languages on the client and server side  require interaction from a user and often include third-party code that can be anything from a simple API implementation to a byzantine framework    I ve lost count of the number of times I ve had another developer sat with me while I step into and follow through what s actually going on in a complex web application with a decent remote debugger to see them flabbergasted and amazed that such tools exist  Often they still don t take the trouble to install and setup these kinds of tools even after seeing them in action    You just can t debug a non trivial web application with print statements  Times ten if you didn t right all the code in your application   If your debugger can step through all the various languages in use and show you the http transactions taking place then so much the better    You can t develop web applications without Firebug  Along similar lines  once you have used Firebug  or very near equivalent  you look on anyone trying to develop web applications with a mixture of pity and horror  Particularly with Firebug showing computed styles  if you remember back to NOT using it and spending hours randomly changing various bits of CSS and adding   important  in too many places to be funny you will never go back

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Test Constantly  You have to write tests  and you have to write them FIRST  Writing tests changes the way you write your code  It makes you think about what you want it to actually do before you just jump in and write something that does everything except what you want it to do    It also gives you goals  Watching your tests go green gives you that little extra bump of confidence that you re getting something accomplished   It also gives you a basis for writing tests for your edge cases  Since you wrote the code against tests to begin with  you probably have some hooks in your code to test with   There is not excuse not to test your code  If you don t you re just lazy  I also think you should test first  as the benefits outweigh the extra time it takes to code this way

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Inheritance is evil and should be deprecated   The truth is aggregation is better in all cases  Static typed OOP languages can t avoid inheritance  it s the only way to describe what method wants from a type  But dynamic languages and duck typing can live without it  Ruby mixins is much more powerful then inheritance and a lot more controllable

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else  is harmful

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Preconditions for arguments to methods functions should be part of the language rather than programmers checking it always

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Developers should be able to modify production code without getting permission from anyone as long as they document their changes and notify the appropriate parties

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UML diagrams are highly overrated  Of course there are useful diagrams e g  class diagram for the Composite Pattern  but many UML diagrams have absolutely no value

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Only write an abstraction if it s going to save 3X as much time later   I see people write all these crazy abstractions sometimes and I think to myself   Why    Unless an abstraction is really going to save you time later or it s going to save the person maintaining your code time  it seems people are just writing spaghetti code more and more

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Not everything needs to be encapsulated into its own method  Some times it is ok to have a method do more then one thing

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XML is highly overrated  I think too many jump onto the XML bandwagon before using their brains    XML for web stuff is great  as it s designed for it  Otherwise I think some problem definition and design thoughts should preempt any decision to use it    My 5 cents

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Boolean variables should be used only for Boolean logic  In all other cases  use enumerations     Boolean variables are used to store data that can only take on two possible values   The problems that arise from using them are frequently overlooked    Programmers often cannot correctly identify when some piece of data should only have two possible values The people who instruct programmers what to do  such as program managers or whomever writes the specs that programmers follow  often cannot correctly identify this either Even when a piece of data is correctly identified as having only two possible states  that guarantee may not hold in the future      In these cases  using Boolean variables leads to confusing code that can often be prevented by using enumerations     Example  Say a programmer is writing software for a car dealership that sells only cars and trucks   The programmer develops a thorough model of the business requirements for his software   Knowing that the only types of vehicles sold are cars and trucks  he correctly identifies that he can use a boolean variable inside a Vehicle class to indicate whether the vehicle is a car or a truck     class Vehicle    bool isTruck           The software is written so when isTruck is true a vehicle is a truck  and when isTruck is false the vehicle is a car   This is a simple check performed many times throughout the code     Everything works without trouble  until one day when the car dealership buys another dealership that sells motorcycles as well   The programmer has to update the software so that it works correctly considering the dealership s business has changed   It now needs to identify whether a vehicle is a car  truck  or motorcycle  three possible states     How should the programmer implement this   isTruck is a boolean variable  so it can hold only two states   He could change it from a boolean to some other type that allows many states  but this would break existing logic and possibly not be backwards compatible   The simplest solution from the programmer s point of view is to add a new variable to represent whether the vehicle is a motorcycle     class Vehicle    bool isTruck   bool isMotorcycle           The code is changed so that when isTruck is true a vehicle is a truck  when isMotorcycle is true a vehicle is a motorcycle  and when they re both false a vehicle is a car     Problems   There are two big problems with this solution    The programmer wants to express the type of the vehicle  which is one idea  but the solution uses two variables to do so   Someone unfamiliar with the code will have a harder time understanding the semantics of these variables than if the programmer had used just one variable that specifies the type entirely    Solving this motorcycle problem by adding a new boolean doesn t make it any easier for the programmer to deal with such situations that happen in the future   If the dealership starts selling buses  the programmer will have to repeat all these steps over again by adding yet another boolean      It s not the developer s fault that the business requirements of his software changed  requiring him to revise existing code   But using boolean variables in the first place made his code less flexible and harder to modify to satisfy unknown future requirements  less  future-proof     When he implemented the changes in the quickest way  the code became harder to read   Using a boolean variable was ultimately a premature optimization     Solution   Using an enumeration in the first place would have prevented these problems     enum EVehicleType   Truck  Car    class Vehicle    EVehicleType type           To accommodate motorcycles in this case  all the programmer has to do is add Motorcycle to EVehicleType  and add new logic to handle the motorcycle cases   No new variables need to be added   Existing logic shouldn t be disrupted   And someone who s unfamiliar with the code can easily understand how the type of the vehicle is stored     Cliff Notes  Don t use a type that can only ever store two different states unless you re absolutely certain two states will always be enough   Use an enumeration if there are any possible conditions in which more than two states will be required in the future  even if a boolean would satisfy existing requirements

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Intranet Frameworks like SharePoint makes me think the whole corporate world is one giant ostrich with its head in the sand  I m not only talking about MOSS here  I ve worked with some other CORPORATE INTRANET products  and absolutely not one of them are great  but SharePoint  MOSS  is by far the worst     Most of these systems don t easily bridge the gap between Intranet and Internet  So as a remote worker you re forced to VPN in  External customers just don t have the luxury of getting hold of your internal information first hand  Sure this can be fixed at a price       The search capabilities are always pathetic  Lots of time other departments simply don t know about information is out there   Information fragments  people start boycotting workflows or revert to email SharePoint development is the most painful form of development on the planet  Nothing sucks like SharePoint  I ve seen a few developers contemplating quitting IT after working for over a year with MOSS   No matter how the developers hate MOSS  no matter how long the most basic of projects take to roll out  no matter how novice the results look  and no matter how unsearchable and fragmented the content is    EVERYONE STILL CONTINUES TO USE AND PURCHASE SHAREPOINT  AND MANAGERS STILL TRY VERY HARD TO PRETEND ITS NOT SATANS SPAWN    Microformats  Using CSS classes originally designed for visual layout - now being assigned for both visual and contextual data is a hack  loads of ambiguity  Not saying the functionality should not exist  but fix the damn base language  HTML wasn t hacked to produce XML - instead the XML language emerged  Now we have these eager script kiddies hacking HTML and CSS to do something it wasn t designed to do  thats still fine  but I wish they would keep these things to themselves  and no make a standard out of it  Just to some up - butchery

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I d rather be truly skilled experienced in an older technology that allows me to solve real world problems effectively   as opposed to new  fashionable  technologies that still going through the adolescent stage

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To quote the late E  W  Dijsktra   Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics  the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians   Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes   I don t understand how one can claim to be a proper programmer without being able to solve pretty simple maths problems such as this one  A CRUD monkey - perhaps  but not a programmer

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Java is not the best thing out there  Just because it comes with an  Enterprise  sticker does not make it good  Nor does it make it fast  Nor does it make it the answer to every question   Also  ROR is not all it is cracked up to be by the Blogsphere   While I am at it  OOP is not always good  In fact  I think it is usually bad

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Best practices aren t

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There s an awful lot of bad teaching out there   We developers like to feel smugly superior when Joel says there s a part of the brain for understanding pointers that some people are just born without  The topics many of us discuss here and are passionate about are esoteric  but sometimes that s only because we make them so

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Manually halting a program is an effective  proven way to find performance problems   Believable  Not to most  True  Absolutely   Programmers are far more judgmental than necessary   Witness all the things considered  evil  or  horrible  in these posts   Programmers are data-structure-happy   Witness all the discussions of classes  inheritance  private-vs-public  memory management  etc   versus how to analyze requirements

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Haven t tested it yet for controversy  but there may be potential   The best line of code is the one you never wrote

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Java Sucks  - yeah  I know that opinion is definitely not held by all     I have that opinion because the majority of Java applications I ve seen are memory hogs  run slowly  horrible user interface and so on   G-Man

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Separation of concerns is evil     Only separate concerns if you have good reason for it  Otherwise  don t separate them   I have encountered too many occasions of separation only for the sake of separation  The second half of Dijkstra s statement  Minimal coupling  maximal cohesion  should not be forgotten      Happy to discuss this further

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The users aren t idiots -- you are   So many times I ve heard developers say  so-and-so is an idiot  and my response is typically  he may be an idiot but you allowed him to be one

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C  or C    should be the first programming language  The first language should NOT be the easy one  it should be one that sets up the student s mind and prepare it for serious computer science  C is perfect for that  it forces students to think about memory and all the low level stuff  and at the same time they can learn how to structure their code  it has functions    C   has the added advantage that it really sucks    thus the students will understand why people had to come up with Java and C

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My controversial opinion  Object Oriented Programming is absolutely the worst thing that s ever happened to the field of software engineering   The primary problem with OOP is the total lack of a rigorous definition that everyone can agree on  This easily leads to implementations that have logical holes in them  or language like Java that adhere to this bizarre religious dogma about what OOP means  while forcing the programmer into doing all these contortions and  design patterns  just to work around the limitations of a particular OOP system   So  OOP tricks the programmer into thinking they re making these huge productivity gains  that OOP is somehow a  natural  way to think  while forcing the programmer to type boatloads of unnecessary boilerplate   Then since nobody knows what OOP actually means  we get vast amounts of time wasted on petty arguments about whether language X or Y is  truly OOP  or not  what bizarre cargo cultish language features are absolutely  essential  for a language to be considered  truly OOP    Instead of demanding that this language or that language be  truly oop   we should be looking at what language features are shown by experiment  to actually increase productivity  instead of trying to force it into being some imagined ideal language  or indeed forcing our programs to conform to some platonic ideal of a  truly object oriented program    Instead of insisting that our programs conform to some platonic ideal of  Truly object oriented   how about we focus on adhering to good engineering principles  making our code easy to read and understand  and using the features of a language that are productive and helpful  regardless of whether they are  OOP  enough or not

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Newer languages  and managed code do not make a bad programmer better

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USE of Desgin patterns and documentation   in web devlopment whats use of these things never felt any use of it

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I often get shouted down when I claim that the code is merely an expression of my design   I quite dislike the way I see so many developers design their system  on the fly  while coding it   The amount of time and effort wasted when one of these cowboys falls off his horse is amazing - and 9 times out of 10 the problem they hit would have been uncovered with just a little upfront design work   I feel that modern methodologies do not emphasize the importance of design in the overall software development process   Eg  the importance placed on code reviews when you haven t even reviewed your design   It s madness

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Singletons are not evil  There is a place for singletons in the real world  and methods to get around them  i e  monostate pattern  are simply singletons in disguise  For instance  a Logger is a perfect candidate for a singleton  Addtionally  so is a message pump  My current app uses distributed computing  and different objects need to be able to send appropriate messages  There should only be one message pump  and everyone should be able to access it  The alternative is passing an object to my message pump everywhere it might be needed and hoping that a new developer doesn t new one up without thinking and wonder why his messages are going nowhere  The uniqueness of the singleton is the most important part  not its availability  The singleton has its place in the world

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You can t write a web application without a remote debugger  Web applications typically tie together interactions between multiple languages on the client and server side  require interaction from a user and often include third-party code that can be anything from a simple API implementation to a byzantine framework    I ve lost count of the number of times I ve had another developer sat with me while I step into and follow through what s actually going on in a complex web application with a decent remote debugger to see them flabbergasted and amazed that such tools exist  Often they still don t take the trouble to install and setup these kinds of tools even after seeing them in action    You just can t debug a non trivial web application with print statements  Times ten if you didn t right all the code in your application   If your debugger can step through all the various languages in use and show you the http transactions taking place then so much the better    You can t develop web applications without Firebug  Along similar lines  once you have used Firebug  or very near equivalent  you look on anyone trying to develop web applications with a mixture of pity and horror  Particularly with Firebug showing computed styles  if you remember back to NOT using it and spending hours randomly changing various bits of CSS and adding   important  in too many places to be funny you will never go back

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Having a process that involves code being approved before it is merged onto the main line is a terrible idea   It breeds insecurity and laziness in developers  who  if they knew they could be screwing up dozens of people would be very careful about the changes they make  get lulled into a sense of not having to think about all the possible clients of the code they may be affecting   The person going over the code is less likely to have thought about it as much as the person writing it  so it can actually lead to poorer quality code being checked in    though  yes  it will probably follow all the style guidelines and be well commented

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It s ok to write garbage code once in a while  Sometimes a quick and dirty piece of garbage code is all that is needed to fulfill a particular task   Patterns  ORMs  SRP  whatever     Throw up a Console or Web App  write some inline sql   feels good    and blast out the requirement

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I believe the use of try catch exception handling is worse than the use of simple return codes and associated common messaging structures to ferry useful error messages   Littering code with try catch blocks is not a solution   Just passing exceptions up the stack hoping whats above you will do the right thing or generate an informative error is not a solution   Thinking you have any chance of systematically verifying the proper exception handlers are avaliable to address anything that could go wrong in either transparent or opague objects is not realistic   Think also in terms of late bindings external libraries and unecessary dependancies between unrelated functions in a call stack as system evolves   Use of return codes are simple  can be easily systematically verified for coverage and if handled properly forces developers to generate useful error messages rather than the all-too-common stack dumps and obscure I O exceptions that are  exceptionally  meaningless to even the most clueful of end users   --  My final objection is the use of garbage collected languages   Don t get me wrong   I love them in some circumstances but in general for server MC systems they have no place in my view   GC is not infallable - even extremely well designed GC algorithms can hang on to objects too long or even forever based on non-obvious circular refrences in their dependancy graphs   Non-GC systems following a few simple patterns and use of memory accounting tools don t have this problem but do require more work in design and test upfront than GC environments   The tradeoff here is that memory leaks are extremely easy to spot during testing in Non-GC while finding GC related problem conditions is a much more difficult proposition   Memory is cheap but what happens when you leak expensive objects such as transaction handles  synchronization objects  socket connections   etc   In my environment the very thought that you can just sit back and let the language worry about this for you is unthinkable without significant fundental changes in software description

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Design patterns are hurting good design more than they re helping it   IMO software design  especially good software design is far too varied to be meaningfully captured in patterns  especially in the small number of patterns people can actually remember - and they re far too abstract for people to really remember more than a handful  So they re not helping much   And on the other hand  far too many people become enamoured with the concept and try to apply patterns everywhere - usually  in the resulting code you can t find the actual design between all the  completely meaningless  Singletons and Abstract Factories

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Preconditions for arguments to methods functions should be part of the language rather than programmers checking it always

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Your job is to put yourself out of work   When you re writing software for your employer  any software that you create is to be written in such a way that it can be picked up by any developer and understood with a minimal amount of effort  It is well designed  clearly and consistently written  formatted cleanly  documented where it needs to be  builds daily as expected  checked into the repository  and appropriately versioned    If you get hit by a bus  laid off  fired  or walk off the job  your employer should be able to replace you on a moment s notice  and the next guy could step into your role  pick up your code and be up and running within a week tops  If he or she can t do that  then you ve failed miserably   Interestingly  I ve found that having that goal has made me more valuable to my employers  The more I strive to be disposable  the more valuable I become to them

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Programmers who don t code in their spare time for fun will never become as good as those that do   I think even the smartest and most talented people will never become truly good programmers unless they treat it as more than a job  Meaning that they do little projects on the side  or just mess with lots of different languages and ideas in their spare time    Note  I m not saying good programmers do nothing else than programming  but they do more than program from 9 to 5

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Junior programmers should be assigned to doing object  module design and design maintenance for several months before they are allowed to actually write or modify code   Too many programmers developers make it to the 5 and 10 year marks without understanding the elements of good design  It can be crippling later when they want to advance beyond just writing and maintaining code

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If you need to read the manual  the software isn t good enough   Plain and simple  -

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SESE  Single Entry Single Exit  is not law  Example   public int foo        if  someCondition           return 0           return -1      vs   public int foo        int returnValue   -1      if  someCondition           returnValue   0           return returnValue      My team and I have found that abiding by this all the time is actually counter-productive in many cases

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The best code is often the code you don t write   As programmers we want to solve every problem by writing some cool method   Anytime we can solve a problem and still give the users 80  of what they want without introducing more code to maintain and test we have provided waaaay more value

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Lazy Programmers are the Best Programmers  A lazy programmer most often finds ways to decrease the amount of time spent writing code  especially a lot of similar or repeating code   This often translates into tools and workflows that other developers in the company team can benefit from   As the developer encounters similar projects he may create tools to bootstrap the development process  e g  creating a DRM layer that works with the company s database design paradigms    Furthermore  developers such as these often use some form of code generation  This means all bugs of the same type  for example  the code generator did not check for null parameters on all methods  can often be fixed by fixing the generator and not the 50  instances of that bug   A lazy programmer may take a few more hours to get the first product out the door  but will save you months down the line

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My controversial opinion  OO Programming is vastly overrated  and treated like a silver bullet   when it is really just another tool in the toolbox  nothing more

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Writing extensive specifications is futile  It s pretty difficult to write correct programs  but compilers  debuggers  unit tests  testers etc  make it possible to detect and eliminate most errors  On the other hand  when you write specs with a comparable level of detail like a program  i e  pseudocode  UML   you are mostly on your own  Consider yourself lucky if you have a tool that helps you get the syntax right   Extensive specifications are most likely bug riddled  The chance that the writer got it right at the first try is about the same like the chance that a similarily large program is bugfree without ever being tested  Peer reviews eliminate some bugs  just like code reviews do

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Programming  It s a fun job   I seem to see two generalized groups of developers  Those that don t love it but they are competent and the money is good  The other group that love it to a point that is kinda creepy  It seems to be their life   I just think it well paying job that is usually interesting and fun  There is all kinds of room to learn something new every minute of every day  I can t think of another job I would prefer  But it is still a job  Compromises will be made and the stuff you produce will not always be as good as it could be   Given my druthers would be on a beach drinking beer or playing with my kids

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Primitive data types are premature optimization   There are languages that get by with just one data type  the scalar  and they do just fine   Other languages are not so fortunate   Developers just throw  int  and  double  in because they have to write in something   What s important is not how big the data types are  but what the data is used for   If you have a day of the month variable  it doesn t matter much if it s signed or unsigned  or whether it s char  short  int  long  long long  float  double  or long double   It does matter that it s a day of the month  and not a month  or day of week  or whatever   See Joel s column on making things that are wrong look wrong  Hungarian notation as originally proposed was a Good Idea   As used in practice  it s mostly useless  because it says the wrong thing

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Junior programmers should be assigned to doing object  module design and design maintenance for several months before they are allowed to actually write or modify code   Too many programmers developers make it to the 5 and 10 year marks without understanding the elements of good design  It can be crippling later when they want to advance beyond just writing and maintaining code

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If a developer cannot write clear  concise and grammatically correct comments then they should have to go back and take English 101     We have developers and  the horror  architects who cannot write coherently   When their documents are reviewed they say things like  oh  don t worry about grammatical errors or spelling - that s not important    Then they wonder why their convoluted garbage documents become convoluted buggy code   I tell the interns that I mentor that if you can t communicate your great ideas verbally or in writing you may as well not have them

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That WordPress IS a CMS  technically  therefore indeed    https   stackoverflow com questions 105648 wordpress-is-it-a-cms

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Upfront design - don t just start writing code because you re excited to write code  I ve seen SO many apps that are poorly designed because the developer was so excited to get coding that they just opened up a white page and started writing code  I understand that things change during the development lifecycle  However  it s difficult working with applications that have several different layouts and development methodologies from form to form  method to method   It s difficult to hit the target your application is to handle if you haven t clearly defined the task and how you plan to code it  Take some time  and not just 5 minutes  and make sure you ve laid out as much of it has you can before you start coding  This way you ll avoid a spaghetti mess that your replacement will have to support

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Code    Design  I m no fan of sophisticated UML diagrams and endless code documentation  In a high level language  your code should be readable and understandable as is  Complex documentation and diagrams aren t really any more user friendly     Here s an article on the topic of Code as Design

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Programmers who don t code in their spare time for fun will never become as good as those that do   I think even the smartest and most talented people will never become truly good programmers unless they treat it as more than a job  Meaning that they do little projects on the side  or just mess with lots of different languages and ideas in their spare time    Note  I m not saying good programmers do nothing else than programming  but they do more than program from 9 to 5

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My controversial view is that the  While  construct should be removed from all programming languages    You can easily replicate While using  Repeat  and a boolean flag  and I just don t believe that it s useful to have the two structures  In fact  I think that having both  Repeat   Until  and  While  EndWhile  in a language confuses new programmers    Update - Extra Notes  One common mistake new programmers make with While is they assume that the code will break as soon as the tested condition flags false  So - If the While test flags false half way through the code  they assume a break out of the While Loop  This mistake isn t made as much with Repeat    I m actually not that bothered which of the two loops types is kept  as long as there s only one loop type  Another reason I have for choosing Repeat over While is that  While  functionality makes more sense written using  repeat  than the other way around    Second Update  I m guessing that the fact I m the only person currently running with a negative score here means this actually is a controversial opinion   Unlike the rest of you  Ha

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There are some  very few  legitimate uses for goto  particularly in C  as a stand-in for exception handling

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Performance does matter

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Getters and Setters are Highly Overused  I ve seen millions of people claiming that public fields are evil  so they make them private and provide getters and setters for all of them  I believe this is almost identical to making the fields public  maybe a bit different if you re using threads  but generally is not the case  or if your accessors have business presentation logic  something  strange  at least    I m not in favor of public fields  but against making a getter setter  or Property  for everyone of them  and then claiming that doing that is encapsulation or information hiding    ha   UPDATE   This answer has raised some controversy in it s comments  so I ll try to clarify it a bit  I ll leave the original untouched since that is what many people upvoted    First of all  anyone who uses public fields deserves jail time  Now  creating private fields and then using the IDE to automatically generate getters and setters for every one of them is nearly as bad as using public fields   Many people think   private fields   public accessors    encapsulation  I say  automatic or not  generation of getter setter pair for your fields effectively goes against the so called encapsulation you are trying to achieve   Lastly  let me quote Uncle Bob in this topic  taken from chapter 6 of  Clean Code        There is a reason that we keep our   variables private  We don t want   anyone else to depend on them  We want   the freedom to change their type or   implementation on a whim or an   impulse  Why  then  do so many   programmers automatically add getters   and setters to their objects  exposing   their private fields as if they were   public

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Excessive HTML in PHP files  sometimes necessary  Excessive Javascript in PHP files  trigger the raptor attack  While I have a hard time figuring out all your switching between echoing and    lt   php  ing html  after all  php is just a processor for html   lines and lines of javascript added in make it a completely unmaintainable mess   People have to grasp this  They are two separate programming languages  Pick one to be your primary language  Then go on and find a quick  clean and easily maintainable way to make your primary include the secondary language   The reason why you jump between PHP  Javascript and HTML all the time is because you are bad at all three of them   Ok  maybe its not exactly controversial  I had the impression this was a general frustration venting topic

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Not very controversial AFAIK but    AJAX was around way before the term was coined and everyone needs to  let it go    People were using it for all sorts of things   No one really cared about it though   Then suddenly POW   Someone coined the term and everyone jumped on the AJAX bandwagon   Suddenly people are now experts in AJAX  as if  experts  in dynamically loading data weren t around before   I think its one of the biggest contributing factors that is leading to the brutal destruction of the internet   That and  Web 2 0

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The world needs more GOTOs  GOTOs are avoided religiously often with no reasoning beyond  my professor told me GOTOs are bad    They have a purpose and would greatly simplify production code in many places   That said  they aren t really necessary in 99  of the code you ll ever write

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Many developers have an underdeveloped sense of where to put things  resulting in messy source code organization at the file  class  and method level  Further  a sizable percentage of such developers are essentially tone-deaf to issues of code organization  Attempts to teach  cajole  threaten  or shame them into keeping their code clean are futile   On any sufficiently successful project  there s usually a developer who does have a good sense of organization very quietly wielding a broom to the code base to keep entropy at bay

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Inversion of control does not eliminate dependencies  but it sure does a great job of hiding them

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If you need to read the manual  the software isn t good enough   Plain and simple  -

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MVC for the web should be far simpler than traditional MVC     Traditional MVC involves code that  listens  for  events  so that the view can continually be updated to reflect the current state of the model   In the web paradigm however  the web server already does the listening  and the request is the event   Therefore MVC for the web need only be a specific instance of the mediator pattern  controllers mediating between views and the model   If a web framework is crafted properly  a re-usable core should probably not be more than 100 lines   That core need only implement the  page controller  paradigm but should be extensible so as to be able to support the  front controller  paradigm   Below is a method that is the crux of my own framework  used successfully in an embedded consumer device manufactured by a Fortune 100 network hardware manufacturer  for a Fortune 50 media company   My approach has been likened to Smalltalk by a former Smalltalk programmer and author of an Oreilly book about the most prominent Java web framework ever  furthermore I have ported the same framework to mod python psp   static function sendResponse IBareBonesController  controller       controller- gt setMto  controller- gt applyInputToModel        controller- gt mto- gt applyModelToView

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Stay away from Celko      http   www dbdebunk com page page 857309 htm  I think it makes a lot more sense to use surrogate primary keys then  natural  primary keys      ocdecio  Fabian Pascal gives  in chapter 3 of his book Practical issues in database management  cited in point 3 at the page that you link  as one of the criteria for choosing a key that of stability  it always exists and doesn t change   When a natural key does not possesses such property  than a surrogate key must be used  for evident reasons  to which you hint in comments   You don t know what he wrote and you have not bothered to check  otherwise you could discover that you actually agree with him  Nothing controversial there  he was saying  don t be dogmatic  adapt general guidelines to circumstances  and  above all  think  use your brain instead of a dogmatic cookbook words-of-guru approach

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You can t measure productivity by counting lines of code   Everyone knows this  but for some reason the practice still persists

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Source files are SO 20th century   Within the body of a function method  it makes sense to represent procedural logic as linear text  Even when the logic is not strictly linear  we have good programming constructs  loops  if statements  etc  that allow us to cleanly represent non-linear operations using linear text   But there is no reason that I should be required to divide my classes among distinct files or sort my functions methods fields properties etc in a particular order within those files  Why can t we just throw all those things within a big database file and let the IDE take care of sorting everything dynamically  If I want to sort my members by name then I ll click the member header on the members table  If I want to sort them by accessibility then I ll click the accessibility header  If I want to view my classes as an inheritence tree  then I ll click the button to do that   Perhaps classes and members could be viewed spatially  as if they were some sort of entities within a virtual world  If the programmer desired  the IDE could automatically position classes  amp  members that use each other near each other so that they re easy to find  Imaging being able to zoom in and out of this virtual world  Zoom all the way out and you can namespace galaxies with little class planets in them  Zoom in to a namespace and you can see class planets with method continents and islands and inner classes as orbitting moons  Zoom in to a method  and you see    the source code for that method   Basically  my point is that in modern languages it doesn t matter what file s  you put your classes in or in what order you define a class s members  so why are we still forced to use these archaic practices  Remember when Gmail came out and Google said  search  don t sort   Well  why can t the same philosophy be applied to programming languages

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It s okay to be Mort  Not everyone is a  rockstar  programmer  some of us do it because it s a good living  and we don t care about all the latest fads and trends  we just want to do our jobs

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One I have been tossing around for a while    The data is the system   Processes and software are built for data  not the other way around     Without data  the process software has little value   Data still has value without a process or software around it   Once we understand the data  what it does  how it interacts  the different forms it exists in at different stages  only then can a solution be built to support the system of data   Successful software systems processes seem to have an acute awareness  if not fanatical mindfulness of  where  the data is at in any given moment

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Not really programming  but I can t stand css only layouts just for the sake of it   It s counter productive  frustrating  and makes maintenance a nightmare of floats and margins where changing the position of a single element can throw the entire page out of whack   It s definitely not a popular opinion  but i m done with my table layout in 20 minutes while the css gurus spend hours tweaking line-height  margins  padding and floats just to do something as basic as vertically centering a paragraph

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Opinion  developers should be testing their own code  I ve seen too much crap handed off to test only to have it not actually fix the bug in question  incurring communication overhead and fostering irresponsible practices

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It takes less time to produce well-documented code than poorly-documented code  When I say well-documented I mean with comments that communicate your intention clearly at every step  Yes  typing comments takes some time  And yes  your coworkers should all be smart enough to figure out what you intended just by reading your descriptive function and variable names and spelunking their way through all your executable statements  But it takes more of their time to do it than if you had just explained your intentions  and clear documentation is especially helpful when the logic of the code turns out to be wrong  Not that your code would ever be wrong     I firmly believe that if you time it from when you start a project to when you ship a defect-free product  writing well-documented code takes less time  For one thing  having to explain clearly what you re doing forces you to think it through clearly  and if you can t write a clear  concise explanation of what your code is accomplishing then it s probably not designed well  And for another purely selfish reason  well-documented and well-structured code is far easier to dump onto someone else to maintain - thus freeing the original author to go create the next big thing  I rarely if ever have to stop what I m doing to explain how my code was meant to work because it s blatantly obvious to anyone who can read English  even if they can t read C C   C  etc    And one more reason is  frankly  my memory just isn t that good  I can t recall what I had for breakfast yesterday  much less what I was thinking when I wrote code a month or a year ago  Perhaps your memory is far better than mine  but because I document my intentions I can quickly pick up wherever I left off and make changes without having to first figure out what I was thinking when I wrote it   That s why I document well - not because I feel some noble calling to produce pretty code fit for display  and not because I m a purist  but simply because end-to-end it lets me ship quality software in less time

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1  The Business Apps farce   I think that the whole  Enterprise  frameworks thing is smoke and mirrors  J2EE   NET  the majority of the Apache frameworks and most abstractions to manage such things create far more complexity than they solve   Take any regular Java or  NET ORM  or any supposedly modern MVC framework for either which does  magic  to solve tedious  simple tasks  You end up writing huge amounts of ugly XML boilerplate that is difficult to validate and write quickly  You have massive APIs where half of those are just to integrate the work of the other APIs  interfaces that are impossible to recycle  and abstract classes that are needed only to overcome the inflexibility of Java and C   We simply don t need most of that   How about all the different application servers with their own darned descriptor syntax  the overly complex database and groupware products   The point of this is not that complexity  bad  it s that unnecessary complexity  bad  I ve worked in massive enterprise installations where some of it was necessary  but even in most cases a few home-grown scripts and a simple web frontend is all that s needed to solve most use cases   I d try to replace all of these enterprisey apps with simple web frameworks  open source DBs  and trivial programming constructs   2  The n-years-of-experience-required   Unless you need a consultant or a technician to handle a specific issue related to an application  API or framework  then you don t really need someone with 5 years of experience in that application  What you need is a developer admin who can read documentation  who has domain knowledge in whatever it is you re doing  and who can learn quickly  If you need to develop in some kind of language  a decent developer will pick it up in less than 2 months  If you need an administrator for X web server  in two days he should have read the man pages and newsgroups and be up to speed  Anything less and that person is not worth what he is paid   3  The common  computer science  degree curriculum   The majority of computer science and software engineering degrees are bull  If your first programming language is Java or C   then you re doing something wrong  If you don t get several courses full of algebra and math  it s wrong  If you don t delve into functional programming  it s incomplete  If you can t apply loop invariants to a trivial for loop  you re not worth your salt as a supposed computer scientist  If you come out with experience in x and y languages and object orientation  it s full of s     A real computer scientist sees a language in terms of the concepts and syntaxes it uses  and sees programming methodologies as one among many  and has such a good understanding of the underlying philosophies of both that picking new languages  design methods  or specification languages should be trivial

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According to the amount of feedback I ve gotten  my most controversial opinion  apparently  is that programmers don t always read the books they claim to have read   This is followed closely by my opinion that a programmer with a formal education is better than the same programmer who is self-taught  but not necessarily better than a different programmer who is self-taught

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Singletons are not evil  There is a place for singletons in the real world  and methods to get around them  i e  monostate pattern  are simply singletons in disguise  For instance  a Logger is a perfect candidate for a singleton  Addtionally  so is a message pump  My current app uses distributed computing  and different objects need to be able to send appropriate messages  There should only be one message pump  and everyone should be able to access it  The alternative is passing an object to my message pump everywhere it might be needed and hoping that a new developer doesn t new one up without thinking and wonder why his messages are going nowhere  The uniqueness of the singleton is the most important part  not its availability  The singleton has its place in the world

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Premature optimization is NOT the root of all evil  Lack of proper planning is the root of all evil      Remember the old naval saw      Proper Planning Prevents P ss Poor   Performance

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If a developer cannot write clear  concise and grammatically correct comments then they should have to go back and take English 101     We have developers and  the horror  architects who cannot write coherently   When their documents are reviewed they say things like  oh  don t worry about grammatical errors or spelling - that s not important    Then they wonder why their convoluted garbage documents become convoluted buggy code   I tell the interns that I mentor that if you can t communicate your great ideas verbally or in writing you may as well not have them

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Every developer should spend several weeks  or even months  developing paper-based systems before they start building electronic ones  They should also then be forced to use their systems   Developing a good paper-based system is hard work  It forces you to take into account human nature  cumbersome processes get ignored  ones that are too complex tend to break down   and teaches you to appreciate the value of simplicity  new work goes in this tray  work for QA goes in this tray  archiving goes in this box    Once you ve worked out how to build a system on paper  it s often a lot easier to build an effective computer system - one that people will actually want to  and be able to  use   The systems we develop are not manned by an army of perfectly-trained automata  real people use them  real people who are trained by managers who are also real people and have far too little time to waste training them how to jump through your hoops   In fact  for my second point   Every developer should be required to run an interactive training course to show users how to use their software

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Programmers who don t code in their spare time for fun will never become as good as those that do   I think even the smartest and most talented people will never become truly good programmers unless they treat it as more than a job  Meaning that they do little projects on the side  or just mess with lots of different languages and ideas in their spare time    Note  I m not saying good programmers do nothing else than programming  but they do more than program from 9 to 5

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The word  evil  is an abused and overused word on Stackoverflow and simular forums    People who use it have too little imagination

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Generated documentation is nearly always totally worthless   Or  as a corollary  Your API needs separate sets of documentation for maintainers and users   There are really two classes of people who need to understand your API  maintainers  who must understand the minutiae of your implementation to be effective at their job  and users  who need a high-level overview  examples  and thorough details about the effects of each method they have access to   I have never encountered generated documentation that succeeded in either area   Generally  when programmers write comments for tools to extract and make documentation out of  they aim for somewhere in the middle--just enough implementation detail to bore and confuse users yet not enough to significantly help maintainers  and not enough overview to be of any real assistance to users   As a maintainer  I d always rather have clean  clear comments  unmuddled by whatever strange markup your auto-doc tool requires  that tell me why you wrote that weird switch statement the way you did  or what bug this seemingly-redundant parameter check fixes  or whatever else I need to know to actually keep the code clean and bug-free as I work on it   I want this information right there in the code  adjacent to the code it s about  so I don t have to hunt down your website to find it in a state that lends itself to being read   As a user  I d always rather have a thorough  well-organized document  a set of web pages would be ideal  but I d settle for a well-structured text file  too  telling me how your API is architectured  what methods do what  and how I can accomplish what I want to use your API to do   I don t want to see internally what classes you wrote to allow me to do work  or files they re in for that matter   And I certainly don t want to have to download your source so I can figure out exactly what s going on behind the curtain   If your documentation were good enough  I wouldn t have to   That s how I see it  anyway

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MIcrosoft is not as bad as many say they are

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Sometimes it s okay to use regexes to extract something from HTML  Seriously  wrangle with an obtuse parser  or use a quick regex like   lt a href           gt    It s not perfect  but your software will be up and running much quicker  and you can probably use yet another regex to verify that the match that was extracted is something that actually looks like a URL  Sure  it s hacky  and probably fails on several edge-cases  but it s good enough for most usage   Based on the massive volume of  How use regex get HTML   questions that get posted here almost daily  and the fact that every answer is  Use an HTML parser   this should be controversial enough

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Null references should be removed from OO languages  Coming from a Java and C  background  where its normal to return null from a method to indicate a failure  I ve come to conclude that nulls cause a lot of avoidable problems  Language designers can remove a whole class of errors relate to NullRefernceExceptions if they simply eliminate null references from code   Additionally  when I call a method  I have no way of knowing whether that method can return null references unless I actually dig in the implementation  I d like to see more languages follow F  s model for handling nulls  F  doesn t allow programmers to return null references  at least for classes compiled in F    instead it requires programmers to represent empty objects using option types  The nice thing about this design is how useful information  such as whether a function can return null references  is propagated through the type system  functions which return a type  a have a different return type than functions which return  a option

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Soon we are going to program in a world without databases  AOP and dependency injection are the GOTO of the 21st century  Building software is a social activity  not a technical one  Joel has a blog

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I m always right   Or call it design by discussion   But if I propose something  you d had better be able to demonstrate why I m wrong  and propose an alternative that you can defend   Of course  this only works if I m reasonable   Luckily for you  I am

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Correct every defect when it s discovered  Not just  severity 1  defects  all defects   Establish a deployment mechanism that makes application updates immediately available to users  but allows them to choose when to accept these updates  Establish a direct communication mechanism with users that enables them to report defects  relate their experience with updates  and suggest improvements   With aggressive testing  many defects can be discovered during the iteration in which they are created  immediately correcting them reduces developer interrupts  a significant contributor to defect creation  Immediately correcting defects reported by users forges a constructive community  replacing product quality with product improvement as the main topic of conversation   Implementing user-suggested improvements that are consistent with your vision and strategy produces community of enthusiastic evangelists

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Sometimes jumping on the bandwagon is ok  I get tired of people exhibiting  grandpa syndrome    You kids and your newfangled Test Driven Development   Every big technology that s come out in the last decade has sucked   Back in my day  we wrote real code      you get the idea    Sometimes things that are popular are popular for a reason

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The vast majority of software being developed does not involve the end-user when gathering requirements   Usually it s just some managers who are providing  requirements

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It IS possible to secure your application   Every time someone asks a question about how to either prevent users from pirating their app  or secure it from hackers  the answer is that it s impossible  Nonsense  If you truly believe that  then leave your doors unlocked  or just take them off the house    And don t bother going to the doctor  either  You re mortal - trying to cure a sickness is just postponing the inevitable   Just because someone might be able to pirate your app or hack your system doesn t mean you shouldn t try to reduce the number of people who will do so  What you re really doing is making it require more work to break in than the intruder pirate is willing to do    Just like a deadbolt and ADT on your house will keep the burglars out  reasonable anti-piracy and security measures will keep hackers and pirates out of your way  Of course  the more tempting it would be for them to break in  the more security you need

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There is no difference between software developer  coder  programmer  architect      I ve been in the industry for more than 10 yeast and still find it absolutely idiotic to try to distinguish between these  roles   You write code  You re a developer  You are spending all day drawing fancy UML diagrams  You re a     well   I have no idea what you are  you re probably just trying to impress somebody   Yes  I know UML

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Web applications suck  My Internet connection is veeery slow  My experience with almost every Web site that is not Google is  at least  frustrating  Why doesn t anybody write desktop apps anymore  Oh  I see  Nobody wants to be bothered with learning how operating systems work  At least  not Windows  The last time you had to handle WM PAINT  your head exploded  Creating a worker thread to perform a long task  I mean  doing it the Windows way  was totally beyond you  What the hell was a callback  Oh  my God     Garbage collection sucks  No  it actually doesn t  But it makes the programmers suck like nothing else  In college  the first language they taught us was Visual Basic  the original one   After that  there was another course where the teachers pretended they taught us C    But the damage was done  Nobody actually knew how to use this esoteric keyword delete did  After testing our programs  we either got invalid address exceptions or memory leaks  Sometimes  we got both  Among the 1  of my faculty who can actually program  only one who can manage his memory by himself  at least  he pretends  and he s writing this rant  The rest write their programs in VB NET  which  by definition  is a bad language     Dynamic typing suck  Unless you re using assembler  of course  that s the kind of dynamic typing that actually deserves praise   What I meant is the overhead imposed by dynamic  interpreted languages makes them suck  And don t come with that silly argument that different tools are good for different jobs  C is the right language for almost everything  it s fast  powerful and portable   and  when it isn t  it s not fast enough   there s always inline assembly     I might come up with more rants  but that will be later  not now

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If it s not native  it s not really programming  By definition  a program is an entity that is run by the computer   It talks directly to the CPU and the OS   Code that does not talk directly to the CPU and the OS  but is instead run by some other program that does talk directly to the CPU and the OS  is not a program  it s a script   This was just simple common sense  completely non-controversial  back before Java came out  Suddenly there was a scripting language with a large enough feature set to accomplish tasks that had previously been exclusively the domain of programs   In response  Microsoft developed the  NET framework and some scripting languages to run on it  and managed to muddy the waters further by slowly reducing support for true programming among their development tools in favor of  NET scripting   Even though it can accomplish a lot of things that you previously had to write programs for  managed code of any variety is still scripting  not programming  and  programs  written in it do and always will share the performance characteristics of scripts  they run more slowly and use up far more RAM than a real  native  program would take to accomplish the same task   People calling it programming are doing everyone a disservice by dumbing down the definition   It leads to lower quality across the board   If you try and make programming so easy that any idiot can do it  what you end up with are a whole lot of idiots who think they can program

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Software-Reuse is the most important way to optimize software-development  Somehow  software-reuse seamed to be in vogue for some time  but has lost it s charm  when many companies found out that just writing powerpoint presentations with reuse slogans doesn t actually help  They reasoned that software-reuse is just not  good enough  and can t live up to their dreams  So it seams that it is not in vogue any more -- it was replaced by plenty of project management newcomers  Agile for example    The fact is  that any really good developer by himself performs some kind of software-reuse  I would say Any developer  not doing software-reuse is a bad developer   I have experienced myself  how much software-reuse can produce performance and stability in development  But of course  a set of PowerPoints and half-hearted confessions of management does not suffice to get its full potential in a company   I have linked a very old article of mine about software-reuse  see title   It was originally written in German and translated thereafter -- so excuse please  when it is not that good writing

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MIcrosoft is not as bad as many say they are

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Code    Design  I m no fan of sophisticated UML diagrams and endless code documentation  In a high level language  your code should be readable and understandable as is  Complex documentation and diagrams aren t really any more user friendly     Here s an article on the topic of Code as Design

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I think Java should have supported system-specific features via thin native library wrappers   Phrased another way  I think Sun s determination to require that Java only support portable features was a big mistake from almost everyone s perspective   A zillion years later  SWT came along and solved the basic problem of writing a portable native-widget UI  but by then Microsoft was forced to fork Java into C  and lots of C   had been written that could otherwise have been done in civilized Java  Now the world runs on a blend of C   VB  Java  C    Ruby  Python and Perl   All the Java programs still look and act wierd except for the SWT ones   If Java had come out with thin wrappers around native libraries  people could have written the SWT-equivalent entirely in Java  and we could have  as things evolved  made portable apparently-native apps in Java  I m totally for portable applications  but it would have been better if that portability were achieved in an open market of middleware UI  and other feature  libraries  and not through simply reducing the user s menu to junk or faking the UI with Swing   I suppose Sun thought that ISV s would suffer with Java s limitations and then all the world s new PC apps would magically run on Suns  Nice try  They ended up not getting the apps AND not having the language take off until we could use it for logic-only server back-end code   If things had been done differently maybe the local application wouldn t be  well  dead

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You must know C to be able to call yoursel a programmer

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I work in ASP NET   VB NET a lot and find ViewState an absolute nightmare   It s enabled by default on the majority of fields and causes a large quantity of encoded data at the start of every web page   The bigger a page gets in terms of controls on a page  the larger the ViewState data will become   Most people don t turn an eye to it  but it creates a large set of data which is usually irrelevant to the tasks being carried on the page   You must manually disable this option on all ASP controls if they re not being used   It s either that or have custom controls for everything   On some pages I work with  half of the page is made up of ViewState  which is a shame really as there s probably better ways of doing it   That s just one small example I can think of in terms of language technology opinions   It may be controversial   By the way  you might want to edit voting on this thread  it could get quite heated by some

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Boolean variables should be used only for Boolean logic  In all other cases  use enumerations     Boolean variables are used to store data that can only take on two possible values   The problems that arise from using them are frequently overlooked    Programmers often cannot correctly identify when some piece of data should only have two possible values The people who instruct programmers what to do  such as program managers or whomever writes the specs that programmers follow  often cannot correctly identify this either Even when a piece of data is correctly identified as having only two possible states  that guarantee may not hold in the future      In these cases  using Boolean variables leads to confusing code that can often be prevented by using enumerations     Example  Say a programmer is writing software for a car dealership that sells only cars and trucks   The programmer develops a thorough model of the business requirements for his software   Knowing that the only types of vehicles sold are cars and trucks  he correctly identifies that he can use a boolean variable inside a Vehicle class to indicate whether the vehicle is a car or a truck     class Vehicle    bool isTruck           The software is written so when isTruck is true a vehicle is a truck  and when isTruck is false the vehicle is a car   This is a simple check performed many times throughout the code     Everything works without trouble  until one day when the car dealership buys another dealership that sells motorcycles as well   The programmer has to update the software so that it works correctly considering the dealership s business has changed   It now needs to identify whether a vehicle is a car  truck  or motorcycle  three possible states     How should the programmer implement this   isTruck is a boolean variable  so it can hold only two states   He could change it from a boolean to some other type that allows many states  but this would break existing logic and possibly not be backwards compatible   The simplest solution from the programmer s point of view is to add a new variable to represent whether the vehicle is a motorcycle     class Vehicle    bool isTruck   bool isMotorcycle           The code is changed so that when isTruck is true a vehicle is a truck  when isMotorcycle is true a vehicle is a motorcycle  and when they re both false a vehicle is a car     Problems   There are two big problems with this solution    The programmer wants to express the type of the vehicle  which is one idea  but the solution uses two variables to do so   Someone unfamiliar with the code will have a harder time understanding the semantics of these variables than if the programmer had used just one variable that specifies the type entirely    Solving this motorcycle problem by adding a new boolean doesn t make it any easier for the programmer to deal with such situations that happen in the future   If the dealership starts selling buses  the programmer will have to repeat all these steps over again by adding yet another boolean      It s not the developer s fault that the business requirements of his software changed  requiring him to revise existing code   But using boolean variables in the first place made his code less flexible and harder to modify to satisfy unknown future requirements  less  future-proof     When he implemented the changes in the quickest way  the code became harder to read   Using a boolean variable was ultimately a premature optimization     Solution   Using an enumeration in the first place would have prevented these problems     enum EVehicleType   Truck  Car    class Vehicle    EVehicleType type           To accommodate motorcycles in this case  all the programmer has to do is add Motorcycle to EVehicleType  and add new logic to handle the motorcycle cases   No new variables need to be added   Existing logic shouldn t be disrupted   And someone who s unfamiliar with the code can easily understand how the type of the vehicle is stored     Cliff Notes  Don t use a type that can only ever store two different states unless you re absolutely certain two states will always be enough   Use an enumeration if there are any possible conditions in which more than two states will be required in the future  even if a boolean would satisfy existing requirements

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Respect the Single Responsibility Principle  At first glance you might not think this would be controversial  but in my experience when I mention to another developer that they shouldn t be doing everything in the page load method they often push back     so for the children please quit building the  do everything  method we see all to often

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Software sucks due to a lack of diversity  No offense to any race but things work pretty when a profession is made up of different races and both genders  Just look at overusing non-renewable energy  It is going great because everyone is contributing  not just the  stereotypical guy

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Design patterns are a waste of time when it comes to software design and development   Don t get me wrong  design patterns are useful but mainly as a communication vector  They can express complex ideas very concisely  factory  singleton  iterator     But they shouldn t serve as a development method  Too often developers architect their code using a flurry of design pattern-based classes where a more concise design would be better  both in term of readability and performance  All that with the illusion that individual classes could be reused outside their domain  If a class is not designed for reuse or isn t part of the interface  then it s an implementation detail   Design patterns should be used to put names on organizational features  not to dictate the way code must be written    It was supposed to be controversial  remember

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My most controversial programming opinion is that finding performance problems is not about measuring  it is about capturing   If you re hunting for elephants in a room  as opposed to mice  do you need to know how big they are  NO  All you have to do is look  Their very bigness is what makes them easy to find  It isn t necessary to measure them first   The idea of measurement has been common wisdom at least since the paper on gprof   Susan L  Graham  et al 1982    when all along  right under our noses  has been a very simple and direct way to find code worth optimizing   As a small example  here s how it works  Suppose you take 5 random-time samples of the call stack  and you happen to see a particular instruction on 3 out of 5 samples  What does that tell you                                                                                                                                                               Foo  call Bar                                   Foo  call Bar                                 Foo  call Bar                                                                                                 Foo  call Bar                                                                                                                                                                               It tells you the program is spending 60  of its time doing work requested by that instruction  Removing it removes that 60                                                                                                                                                                Foo   a l Bar                                   Foo   a l Bar                       X         Foo  cXll Bar                         X                                                                       Foo   a l Bar                                                                                                                                                                               Roughly   If you can remove the instruction  or invoke it a lot less   that s a 2 5x speedup  approximately   Notice - recursion is irrelevant - if the elephant s pregnant  it s not any smaller   Then you can repeat the process  until you truly approach an optimum    This did not require accuracy of measurement  function timing  call counting  graphs  hundreds of samples  any of that typical profiling stuff    Some people use this whenever they have a performance problem  and don t understand what s the big deal   Most people have never heard of it  and when they do hear of it  think it is just an inferior mode of sampling  But it is very different  because it pinpoints problems by giving cost of call sites  as well as terminal instructions   as a percent of wall-clock time  Most profilers  not all   whether they use sampling or instrumentation  do not do that  Instead they give a variety of summary measurements that are  at best  clues to the possible location of problems  Here is a more extensive summary of the differences    In fact that paper claimed that the purpose of gprof was to  help the user evaluate alternative implementations of abstractions   It did not claim to help the user locate the code needing an alternative implementation  at a finer level then functions     My second most controversial opinion is this  or it might be if it weren t so hard to understand

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I work in ASP NET   VB NET a lot and find ViewState an absolute nightmare   It s enabled by default on the majority of fields and causes a large quantity of encoded data at the start of every web page   The bigger a page gets in terms of controls on a page  the larger the ViewState data will become   Most people don t turn an eye to it  but it creates a large set of data which is usually irrelevant to the tasks being carried on the page   You must manually disable this option on all ASP controls if they re not being used   It s either that or have custom controls for everything   On some pages I work with  half of the page is made up of ViewState  which is a shame really as there s probably better ways of doing it   That s just one small example I can think of in terms of language technology opinions   It may be controversial   By the way  you might want to edit voting on this thread  it could get quite heated by some

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Notepad is a perfectly fine text editor   And sometimes wordpad for non-windows line breaks    Edit config files View log files Development   I know people who actually believe this   They will however use an IDE for development  but continue to use Notepad for everything else

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Source files are SO 20th century   Within the body of a function method  it makes sense to represent procedural logic as linear text  Even when the logic is not strictly linear  we have good programming constructs  loops  if statements  etc  that allow us to cleanly represent non-linear operations using linear text   But there is no reason that I should be required to divide my classes among distinct files or sort my functions methods fields properties etc in a particular order within those files  Why can t we just throw all those things within a big database file and let the IDE take care of sorting everything dynamically  If I want to sort my members by name then I ll click the member header on the members table  If I want to sort them by accessibility then I ll click the accessibility header  If I want to view my classes as an inheritence tree  then I ll click the button to do that   Perhaps classes and members could be viewed spatially  as if they were some sort of entities within a virtual world  If the programmer desired  the IDE could automatically position classes  amp  members that use each other near each other so that they re easy to find  Imaging being able to zoom in and out of this virtual world  Zoom all the way out and you can namespace galaxies with little class planets in them  Zoom in to a namespace and you can see class planets with method continents and islands and inner classes as orbitting moons  Zoom in to a method  and you see    the source code for that method   Basically  my point is that in modern languages it doesn t matter what file s  you put your classes in or in what order you define a class s members  so why are we still forced to use these archaic practices  Remember when Gmail came out and Google said  search  don t sort   Well  why can t the same philosophy be applied to programming languages

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Getters and Setters are Highly Overused  I ve seen millions of people claiming that public fields are evil  so they make them private and provide getters and setters for all of them  I believe this is almost identical to making the fields public  maybe a bit different if you re using threads  but generally is not the case  or if your accessors have business presentation logic  something  strange  at least    I m not in favor of public fields  but against making a getter setter  or Property  for everyone of them  and then claiming that doing that is encapsulation or information hiding    ha   UPDATE   This answer has raised some controversy in it s comments  so I ll try to clarify it a bit  I ll leave the original untouched since that is what many people upvoted    First of all  anyone who uses public fields deserves jail time  Now  creating private fields and then using the IDE to automatically generate getters and setters for every one of them is nearly as bad as using public fields   Many people think   private fields   public accessors    encapsulation  I say  automatic or not  generation of getter setter pair for your fields effectively goes against the so called encapsulation you are trying to achieve   Lastly  let me quote Uncle Bob in this topic  taken from chapter 6 of  Clean Code        There is a reason that we keep our   variables private  We don t want   anyone else to depend on them  We want   the freedom to change their type or   implementation on a whim or an   impulse  Why  then  do so many   programmers automatically add getters   and setters to their objects  exposing   their private fields as if they were   public

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If you can only think of one way to do it  don t do it   Whether it s an interface layout  a task flow  or a block of code  just stop   Do something to collect more ideas  like asking other people how they would do it  and don t go back to implementing until you have at least three completely different ideas and at least one crisis of confidence   Generally  when I think something can only be done one way  or think only one method has any merit  it s because I haven t thought through the factors which ought to be influencing the design thoroughly enough   If I had  some of them would clearly be in conflict  leading to a mess and thus an actual decision rather than a rote default   Being a solid programmer does not make you a solid interface designer  And following all of the interface guidelines in the world will only begin to help   If it s even humanly possible     There seems to be a peculiar addiction to making things  cute  and  clever

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I have a few    there s exceptions to everything so these are not hard and fast but they do apply in most cases  Nobody cares if your website validates  is XHTML strict  is standards-compliant  or has a W3C badge    It may earn you some high-fives from fellow Web developers  but the rest of people looking at your site could give a crap whether you ve validated your code or not  the vast majority of Web surfers are using IE or Firefox  and since both of those browsers are forgiving of nonstandards  nonstrict  invalidated HTML then you really dont need to worry about it  If you ve built a site for a car dealer  a mechanic  a radio station  a church  or a local small business  how many people in any of those businesses  target demographics do you think care about valid HTML  I d hazard a guess it s pretty close to 0    Most open-source software is useless  overcomplicated crap    Let me install this nice piece of OSS I ve found  It looks like it should do exactly what I want  Oh wait  first I have to install this other window manager thingy  OK  Then i need to get this command-line tool and add it to my path  Now I need the latest runtimes for X  Y  and Z  now i need to make sure i have these processes running  ok  great    its all configured  Now let me learn a whole new set of commands to use it  Oh cool  someone built a GUI for it  I guess I don t need to learn these commands  Wait  I need this library on here to get the GUI to work  Gotta download that now  ok  now its working   crap  I can t figure out this terrible UI    sound familiar  OSS is full of complication for complication s sake  tricky installs that you need to be an expert to perform  and tools that most people wouldn t know what to do with anyway  So many projects fall by the wayside  others are so niche that very few people would use them  and some of the decent ones  FlowPlayer  OSCommerce  etc  have such ridiculously overcomplicated and bloated source code that it defeats the purpose of being able to edit the source  You can edit the source    if you can figure out which of the 400 files contains the code that needs modification  You re really in trouble when you learn that its all 400 of them

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coding is not typing  It takes time to write the code  Most of the time in the editor window  you are just looking at the code  not actually typing  Not as often  but quite frequently  you are deleting what you have written  Or moving from one place to another  Or renaming    If you are banging away at the keyboard for a long time you are doing something wrong    Corollary  Number of lines of code written per day is not a linear measurement of a programmers productivity  as programmer that writes 100 lines in a day is quite likely a better programmer then the one that writes 20  but one that writes 5000 is certainly a bad programmer

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Most of programming job interview questions are pointless  Especially those figured out by programmers   It is a common case  at least according to my  amp  my friends experience  where a puffed up  programmer  asks you some tricky wtf he spent weeks googling for  The funny thing about that is  you get home and google it within a minute  It s like they often try to beat you up with their sophisticated weapons  instead of checking if you d be a comprehensive  pragmatic team player to work with    Similar stupidity IMO is when you re being asked for highly accessible fundamentals  like   Oh wait  let me see if you can pseudo-code that insert name here-algorithm on a sheet of paper  sic     Do I really need to remember it while applying for a high-level programming job  Should I efficiently solve problems or puzzles

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Xah Lee  actually has some pretty noteworthy and legitimate viewpoints if you can filter out all the invective  and rationally evaluate statements without agreeing  or disagreeing  based solely on the personality behind the statements  A lot of my  controversial  viewpoints have been echoed by him  and other notorious  trolls  who have criticized languages or tools I use d  on a regular basis   Documentation Generators  http   en wikipedia or  wiki Comparison of documentation generators       the kind where the creator invented some custom-made especially-for-documenting-sourcecode roll-your-own syntax  including  but not limited to JavaDoc  are totally superfluous and a waste of time because    1  They are underused by the people who should be using them the most  and 2  All of these mini-documentation-languages all of them could easily be replaced with YAML

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Code layout does matter  Maybe specifics of brace position should remain purely religious arguments - but it doesn t mean that all layout styles are equal  or that there are no objective factors at all   The trouble is that the uber-rule for layout  namely   be consistent   sound as it is  is used as a crutch by many to never try to see if their default style can be improved on - and that  furthermore  it doesn t even matter   A few years ago I was studying Speed Reading techniques  and some of the things I learned about how the eye takes in information in  fixations   can most optimally scan pages  and the role of subconsciously picking up context  got me thinking about how this applied to code - and writing code with it in mind especially   It led me to a style that tended to be columnar in nature  with identifiers logically grouped and aligned where possible  in particular I became strict about having each method argument on its own line   However  rather than long columns of unchanging structure it s actually beneficial to vary the structure in blocks so that you end up with rectangular islands that the eye can take in in a single fixture - even if you don t consciously read every character   The net result is that  once you get used to it  which typically takes 1-3 days  it becomes pleasing to the eye  easier and faster to comprehend  and is less taxing on the eyes and brain because it s laid out in a way that makes it easier to take in   Almost without exception  everyone I have asked to try this style  including myself  initially said   ugh I hate it    but after a day or two said   I love it - I m finding it hard not to go back and rewrite all my old stuff this way     I ve been hoping to find the time to do more controlled experiments to collect together enough evidence to write a paper on  but as ever have been too busy with other things  However this seemed like a good opportunity to mention it to people interested in controversial techniques  -    Edit   I finally got around to blogging about this  after many years parked in the  meaning to  phase   Part one  Part two  Part three

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Requirements analysis  specification  design  and documentation will almost never fit into a  template    You are 100  of the time better off by starting with a blank document and beginning to type with a view of  I will explain this in such a way that if I were dead and someone else read this document  they would know everything that I know and see and understand now  and then organizing from there  letting section headings and such develop naturally and fit the task you are specifying  rather than being constrained to some business or school s idea of what your document should look like   If you have to do a diagram  rather than using somebody s formal and incomprehensible system  you re often better off just drawing a diagram that makes sense  with a clear legend  which actually specifies the system you are trying to specify and communicates the information that the developer on the other end  often you  after a few years  needs to receive    If you have to  once you ve written the real documentation  you can often shoehorn it into whatever template straightjacket your organization is imposing on you   You ll probably find yourself having to add section headings and duplicate material  though    The only time templates for these kinds of documents make sense is when you have a large number of tasks which are very similar in nature  differing only in details    Write a program to allow single-use remote login access through this modem bank  driving the terminal connection nexus with C-Kermit    Produce a historical trend and forecast report for capacity usage    Use this library to give all reports the ability to be faxed    Fix this code for the year 2000 problem   and  Add database triggers to this table to populate a software product provided for us by a third-party vendor  can not all be described by the same template  no matter what people may think   And for the record  the requirements and design diagramming techniques that my college classes attempted to teach me and my classmates could not be used to specify a simple calculator program  and everyone knew it

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in almost all cases  comments are evil  http   gooddeveloper wordpress com

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A majority of the  user-friendly  Fourth Generation Languages  SQL included  are worthless overrated pieces of rubbish that should have never made it to common use   4GLs in general have a wordy and ambiguous syntax  Though 4GLs are supposed to allow  non technical people  to write programs  you still need the  technical  people to write and maintain them anyway   4GL programs in general are harder to write  harder to read and harder to optimize than   4GLs should be avoided as far as possible

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The only  best practice  you should be using all the time is  Use Your Brain    Too many people jumping on too many bandwagons and trying to force methods  patterns  frameworks etc onto things that don t warrant them   Just because something is new  or because someone respected has an opinion  doesn t mean it fits all     EDIT  Just to clarify - I don t think people should ignore best practices  valued opinions etc  Just that people shouldn t just blindly jump on something without thinking about WHY this  thing  is so great  IS it applicable to what I m doing  and WHAT benefits drawbacks does it bring

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Only write an abstraction if it s going to save 3X as much time later   I see people write all these crazy abstractions sometimes and I think to myself   Why    Unless an abstraction is really going to save you time later or it s going to save the person maintaining your code time  it seems people are just writing spaghetti code more and more

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When many new technologies appear on the scene I only learn enough about them to decide if I need them right now     If not  I put them aside until the rough edges are knocked off by  early adopters  and then check back again every few months   years

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The class library guidelines for implementing IDisposable are wrong   I don t share this too often  but I believe that the guidance for the default implementation for IDisposable is completely wrong   My issue isn t with the overload of Dispose and then removing the item from finalization  but rather  I despise how there is a call to release the managed resources in the finalizer   I personally believe that an exception should be thrown  and yes  with all the nastiness that comes from throwing it on the finalizer thread    The reasoning behind it is that if you are a client or server of IDisposable  there is an understanding that you can t simply leave the object lying around to be finalized   If you do  this is a design implementation flaw  depending on how it is left lying around  and or how it is exposed   as you are not aware of the lifetime of instances that you should be aware of   I think that this type of bug error is on the level of race conditions synchronization to resources   Unfortunately  with calling the overload of Dispose  that error is never materialized   Edit   I ve written a blog post on the subject if anyone is interested   http   www caspershouse com post A-Better-Implementation-Pattern-for-IDisposable aspx

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All source code and comments should be written in English  Writing source code and or comments in languages other than English makes it less reusable and more difficult to debug if you don t understand the language they are written in   Same goes for SQL tables  views  and columns  especially when abbrevations are used  If they aren t abbreviated  I might be able to translate the table column name on-line  but if they re abbreviated all I can do is SELECT and try to decipher the results

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My controversial opinion  Object Oriented Programming is absolutely the worst thing that s ever happened to the field of software engineering   The primary problem with OOP is the total lack of a rigorous definition that everyone can agree on  This easily leads to implementations that have logical holes in them  or language like Java that adhere to this bizarre religious dogma about what OOP means  while forcing the programmer into doing all these contortions and  design patterns  just to work around the limitations of a particular OOP system   So  OOP tricks the programmer into thinking they re making these huge productivity gains  that OOP is somehow a  natural  way to think  while forcing the programmer to type boatloads of unnecessary boilerplate   Then since nobody knows what OOP actually means  we get vast amounts of time wasted on petty arguments about whether language X or Y is  truly OOP  or not  what bizarre cargo cultish language features are absolutely  essential  for a language to be considered  truly OOP    Instead of demanding that this language or that language be  truly oop   we should be looking at what language features are shown by experiment  to actually increase productivity  instead of trying to force it into being some imagined ideal language  or indeed forcing our programs to conform to some platonic ideal of a  truly object oriented program    Instead of insisting that our programs conform to some platonic ideal of  Truly object oriented   how about we focus on adhering to good engineering principles  making our code easy to read and understand  and using the features of a language that are productive and helpful  regardless of whether they are  OOP  enough or not

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Not all programmers are created equal  Quite often managers think that DeveloperA    DeveloperB simply because they have same level of experience and so on  In actual fact  the performance of one developer can be 10x or even 100x that of another   It s politically risky to talk about it  but sometimes I feel like pointing out that  even though several team members may appear to be of equal skill  it s not always the case  I have even seen cases where lead developers were  beyond hope  and junior devs did all the actual work - I made sure they got the credit  though

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Good Coders Code and Great Coders Reuse It  This is happening right now But  Good Coder  is the only ONE who enjoy that code   and  Great Coders  are for only to find out the bug in to that because they don t have the time to think and code  But they have time for find the bug in that code   so don t criticize          Create your own code how YOU want

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A majority of the  user-friendly  Fourth Generation Languages  SQL included  are worthless overrated pieces of rubbish that should have never made it to common use   4GLs in general have a wordy and ambiguous syntax  Though 4GLs are supposed to allow  non technical people  to write programs  you still need the  technical  people to write and maintain them anyway   4GL programs in general are harder to write  harder to read and harder to optimize than   4GLs should be avoided as far as possible

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The word  evil  is an abused and overused word on Stackoverflow and simular forums    People who use it have too little imagination

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Detailed designs are a waste of time  and if an engineer needs them in order to do a decent job  then it s not worth employing them   OK  so a couple of ideas are thrown together here    1  the old idea of waterfall development where you supposedly did all your design up front  resulting in some glorified extremely detailed class diagrams  sequence diagrams etc  etc   was a complete waste of time   As I once said to a colleague  I ll be done with design once the code is finished   Which I think is what agile is partly a recognition of - that the code is the design  and that any decent developer is continually refactoring   This of course  makes the idea that your class diagrams are out of date laughable - they always will be   2  management often thinks that you can usefully take a poor engineer and use them as a  code monkey  - in other words they re not particularly talented  but heck - can t you use them to write some code   Well   no  If you have to spend so much time writing detailed specs that you re basically specifying the code  then it will be quicker to write it yourself   You re not saving any time   If a developer isn t smart enough to use their own imagination and judgement they re not worth employing   Note  I m not talking about junior engineers who are able to learn  Plenty of  senior engineers  fall into this category

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C must die   Voluntarily programming in C when another language  say  D  is available should be punishable for neglect

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I m always right   Or call it design by discussion   But if I propose something  you d had better be able to demonstrate why I m wrong  and propose an alternative that you can defend   Of course  this only works if I m reasonable   Luckily for you  I am

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Storing XML in a CLOB in a relational database is often a horrible cop-out   Not only is it hideous in terms of performance  it shifts responsibility for correctly managing structure of the data away from the database architect and onto the application programmer

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Getting paid to program is generally one of the worst uses of a man s time   For one thing  you re in competition with the Elbonians  who work for a quarter a day  You need to convince your employer that you offer something the Elbonians never can  and that your something is worth a livable salary  As the Elbonians get more and more overseas business  the real advantage wears thin  and management knows it   For another thing  you re spending time solving someone else s problems  That s time you could spend advancing your own interests  or working on problems that actually interest you  And if you think you re saving the world by working on the problems of other men  then why don t you just get the Elbonians to do it for you   Last  the great innovations in software  visicalc  Napster  Pascal  etc  were not created by cubicle farms  They were created by one or two people without advance pay  You can t forcibly recreate that  It s just magic that sometimes happens when a competent programmer has a really good idea   There is enough software  There are enough software developers  You don t have to be one for hire  Save your talents  your time  your hair  your marriage  Let someone else sell his soul to the keyboard  If you want to program  fine  But don t do it for the money

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I don t know if it s really controversial  but how about this  Method and function names are the best kind of commentary your code can have  if you find yourself writing a comment  turn the the piece of of code you re commenting into a function method   Doing this has the pleasant side-effect of forcing you to decompose your program well  avoids having comments that can quickly become out of sync with reality  gives you something you can grep the codebase for  and leaves your code with a fresh lemon odour

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If you have any idea how to program you are not fit to place a button on a form  Is that controversial enough      No matter how hard we try  it s almost impossible to have appropriate empathy with 53 year old Doris who has to use our order-entry software   We simply cannot grasp the mental model of what she imagines is going on inside the computer  because we don t need to imagine  we know whats going on  or have a very good idea   Interaction Design should be done by non-programmers   Of course  this is never actually going to happen   Contradictorily I m quite glad about that  I like UI design even though deep down I know I m unsuited to it   For further info  read the book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum   Be warned  I found this book upsetting and insulting  it s a difficult read if you are a developer that cares about the user s experience

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Code Generation is bad  I hate languages that require you to make use of code generation  or copy amp paste  for simple things  like JavaBeans with all their Getters and Setters   C  s AutoProperties are a step in the right direction  but for nice DTOs with Fields  Properties and Constructor parameters you still need a lot of redundancy

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Write small methods   It seems that programmers love to write loooong methods where they do multiple different things     I think that a method should be created wherever you can name one

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Googling it  is okay   Yes  I know it offends some people out there that their years of intense memorization and or glorious stacks of programming books are starting to fall by the wayside to a resource that anyone can access within seconds  but you shouldn t hold that against people that use it   Too often I hear googling answers to problems the result of criticism  and it really is without sense   First of all  it must be conceded that everyone needs materials to reference   You don t know everything and you will need to look things up   Conceding that  does it really matter where you got the information   Does it matter if you looked it up in a book  looked it up on Google  or heard it from a talking frog that you hallucinated   No   A right answer is a right answer   What is important is that you understand the material  use it as the means to an end of a successful programming solution  and the client your employer is happy with the results    although if you are getting answers from hallucinatory talking frogs  you should probably get some help all the same

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BAD IDE s make the programming language weak  Good programming IDEs really make working with certain languages easier and better to oversee  I have been bit spoiled in my professional carreer  the companies I worked for always had the latest Visual Studio s ready to use   For about 8 months  I have been doing a lot of Cocoa next to my work and the Xcode editor makes working with that language just way too difficult  Overloads are difficult to find and the overal way of handling open files just makes your screen really messy  really fast  It s really a shame  because Cocoa is a cool and powerful language to work with   Ofcourse die-hard Xcode fans will now vote down my post  but there are so many IDEs that are really a lot better   People making a switch to IT  who just shouldn t  This is a copy paste from a blog post of mine  made last year     The experiences I have are mainly about the dutch market  but they also might apply to any other market   We  as I group all Software Engineers together  are currently in a market that might look very good for us  Companies are desperately trying to get Software Engineers  from now on SE    no matter the price  If you switch jobs now  you can demand almost anything you want  In the Netherlands there is a trend now to even give 2 lease cars with a job  just to get you to work for them  How weird is that  How am I gonna drive 2 cars at the same time    Of course this sounds very good for us  but this also creates a very unhealthy situation    For example  If you are currently working for a company which is growing fast and you are trying to attract more co-workers  to finally get some serious software development from the ground  there is no-one to be found without offering sky high salaries  Trying to find quality co-workers is very hard  A lot of people are attracted to our kind of work  because of the good salaries  but this also means that a lot of people without the right passion are entering our market   Passion  yes  I think that is the right word  When you have passion for your job  your job won   t stop at 05 00 PM  You will keep refreshing all of your development RSS feeds all night  You will search the internet for the latest technologies that might be interesting to use at work  And you will start about a dozen new    promising    projects a month  just to see if you can master that latest technology you just read about a couple of weeks ago  and find an useful way of actually using that technology    Without that passion  the market might look very nice  because of the cars  money and of course the hot girls we attract   but I don   t think it will be that interesting very long as  let   s say  fireman or fighter-pilot   It might sound that I am trying to protect my own job here and partly that is true  But I am also trying to protect myself against the people I don   t want to work with  I want to have heated discussions about stuff I read about  I want to be able to spar with people that have the same    passion    for the job as I have  I want colleagues that are working with me for the right reasons   Where are those people I am looking for

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Most comments in code are in fact a pernicious form of code duplication   We spend most of our time maintaining code written by others  or ourselves  and poor  incorrect  outdated  misleading comments must be near the top of the list of most annoying artifacts in code   I think eventually many people just blank them out  especially those flowerbox monstrosities   Much better to concentrate on making the code readable  refactoring as necessary  and minimising idioms and quirkiness   On the other hand  many courses teach that comments are very nearly more important than the code itself  leading to the this next line adds one to invoiceTotal style of commenting

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Before January 1st 1970  true and false were the other way around

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A real programmer loves open-source like a soulmate and loves Microsoft as a dirty but satisfying prostitute

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Having a process that involves code being approved before it is merged onto the main line is a terrible idea   It breeds insecurity and laziness in developers  who  if they knew they could be screwing up dozens of people would be very careful about the changes they make  get lulled into a sense of not having to think about all the possible clients of the code they may be affecting   The person going over the code is less likely to have thought about it as much as the person writing it  so it can actually lead to poorer quality code being checked in    though  yes  it will probably follow all the style guidelines and be well commented

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Regurgitating well known sayings by programming greats out of context with the zeal of a fanatic and the misplaced assumption that they are ironclad rules really gets my goat   For example  premature optimization is the root of all evil  as covered by this thread   IMO  many technical problems and solutions are very context sensitive and the notion of global best practices is a fallacy

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I don t care how powerful a programming language is if its syntax is not intuitive and I can t set it aside for some period of time and come back to it without too much effort at refreshing on the details   I would rather a language itself be intuitive than it be cryptic but powerful for creating DSL s   A computer language is a user interface for ME  and I want it designed for intuitive ease of use like any other user interface

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Schooling ruins creativity      Ruins  means  potentially ruins   Granted  schooling is needed  Everyone needs to learn stuff before they can use it - however  all those great ideas you had about how to do a certain strategy for a specific business-field can easily be thrown into that deep brain-void of ours if we aren t careful   As you learn new things and acquire new skills  you are also boxing your mindset on those new things and skills  since they apparently are  the way to do it   Being humans  we tend to listen to authorities - being it a teacher  a consultant  a co-worker or even a site   forum you like  We should ALWAYS be aware of that  flaw  in how our mind works  Listen to what other people say  but don t take what they say for granted  Always keep a critic point-of-view on every new information you receive   Instead of thinking  Wow  that s smart  I will use that from now on   we should think  Wow  that s smart  Now  how can I use that in my personal toolbox of skills and ideas

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A Clever Programmer Is Dangerous  I have spent more time trying to fix code written by  clever  programmers  I d rather have a good programmer than an exceptionally smart programmer who wants to prove how clever he is by writing code that only he  or she  can interpret

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There is no difference between software developer  coder  programmer  architect      I ve been in the industry for more than 10 yeast and still find it absolutely idiotic to try to distinguish between these  roles   You write code  You re a developer  You are spending all day drawing fancy UML diagrams  You re a     well   I have no idea what you are  you re probably just trying to impress somebody   Yes  I know UML

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Requirements analysis  specification  design  and documentation will almost never fit into a  template    You are 100  of the time better off by starting with a blank document and beginning to type with a view of  I will explain this in such a way that if I were dead and someone else read this document  they would know everything that I know and see and understand now  and then organizing from there  letting section headings and such develop naturally and fit the task you are specifying  rather than being constrained to some business or school s idea of what your document should look like   If you have to do a diagram  rather than using somebody s formal and incomprehensible system  you re often better off just drawing a diagram that makes sense  with a clear legend  which actually specifies the system you are trying to specify and communicates the information that the developer on the other end  often you  after a few years  needs to receive    If you have to  once you ve written the real documentation  you can often shoehorn it into whatever template straightjacket your organization is imposing on you   You ll probably find yourself having to add section headings and duplicate material  though    The only time templates for these kinds of documents make sense is when you have a large number of tasks which are very similar in nature  differing only in details    Write a program to allow single-use remote login access through this modem bank  driving the terminal connection nexus with C-Kermit    Produce a historical trend and forecast report for capacity usage    Use this library to give all reports the ability to be faxed    Fix this code for the year 2000 problem   and  Add database triggers to this table to populate a software product provided for us by a third-party vendor  can not all be described by the same template  no matter what people may think   And for the record  the requirements and design diagramming techniques that my college classes attempted to teach me and my classmates could not be used to specify a simple calculator program  and everyone knew it

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Developers overuse databases   All too often  developers store data in a DBMS that should be in code or in file s    I ve seen a one-column-one-row table that stored the  system password   separate from the user table    I ve seen constants stored in databases   I ve seen databases that would make a grown coder cry   There is some sort of mystical awe that the offending coders have of the DBMS--the database can do anything  but they don t know how it works   DBAs practice a black art   It also allows responsibility transference   The database is too slow     The database did it   and other excuses are common   Left unchecked  these coders go on develop databases-within-databases  systems-within-systems    There is a name to this anti-pattern  but I forget what it is

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Sometimes it s appropriate to swallow an exception   For UI bells and wistles  prompting the user with an error message is interuptive  and there is ussually nothing for them to do anyway   In this case  I just log it  and deal with it when it shows up in the logs

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Opinion  explicit variable declaration is a great thing     I ll never understand the  wisdom  of letting the developer waste costly time tracking down runtime errors caused by variable name typos instead of simply letting the compiler interpreter catch them   Nobody s ever given me an explanation better than  well it saves time since I don t have to write  int i      Uhhhhh    yeah  sure  but how much time does it take to track down a runtime error

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Software Architects Designers are Overrated  As a developer  I hate the idea of Software Architects  They are basically people that no longer code full time  read magazines and articles  and then tell you how to design software  Only people that actually write software full time for a living should be doing that  I don t care if you were the worlds best coder 5 years ago before you became an Architect  your opinion is useless to me   How s that for controversial   Edit  to clarify   I think most Software Architects make great Business Analysts  talking with customers  writing requirements  tests  etc   I simply think they have no place in designing software  high level or otherwise

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Understanding  what  to do is at least as important as knowing  how  to do it  and almost always it s much more important than knowing the  best  way to solve a problem   Domain-specific knowledge is often crucial to write good software

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Development projects are bound to fail unless the team of programmers is given as a whole complete empowerment to make all decisions related to the technology being used

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UML diagrams are highly overrated  Of course there are useful diagrams e g  class diagram for the Composite Pattern  but many UML diagrams have absolutely no value

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That  erm  people should comment their code  It seems to be pretty controversial around here     The code only tells me what actually it does  not what it was supposed to do  The time I see a function calculating the point value of an Australian Bond Future is the time I want to see some comments that indicate what the coder thought the calculation should be

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Don t use inheritance unless you can explain why you need it

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Reuse of code is inversely proportional to its  reusability    Simply because  reusable  code is more complex  whereas quick hacks are easy to understand  so they get reused   Software failures should take down the system  so that it can be examined and fixed   Software attempting to handle failure conditions is often worse than crashing   ie  is it better to have a system reset after crashing  or should it be indefinitely hung because the failure handler has a bug

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All variables properties should be readonly final by default   The reasoning is a bit analogous to the sealed argument for classes  put forward by Jon  One entity in a program should have one job  and one job only  In particular  it makes absolutely no sense for most variables and properties to ever change value  There are basically two exceptions    Loop variables  But then  I argue that the variable actually doesn t change value at all  Rather  it goes out of scope at the end of the loop and is re-instantiated in the next turn  Therefore  immutability would work nicely with loop variables and everyone who tries to change a loop variable s value by hand should go straight to hell  Accumulators  For example  imagine the case of summing over the values in an array  or even a list string that accumulates some information about something else   Today  there are better means to accomplish the same goal  Functional languages have higher-order functions  Python has list comprehension and  NET has LINQ  In all these cases  there is no need for a mutable accumulator   result holder   Consider the special case of string concatenation  In many environments   NET  Java   strings are actually immutables  Why then allow an assignment to a string variable at all  Much better to use a builder class  i e  a StringBuilder  all along    I realize that most languages today just aren t built to acquiesce in my wish  In my opinion  all these languages are fundamentally flawed for this reason  They would lose nothing of their expressiveness  power  and ease of use if they would be changed to treat all variables as read-only by default and didn t allow any assignment to them after their initialization

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XHTML is evil  Write HTML   You will have to set the MIME type to text html anyway  so why fooling yourself into believing that you are really writing XML  Whoever is going to download your page is going to believe that it is HTML  so make it HTML    And with that  feel free and happy to not close your  lt li   it isn t necessary  Don t close the html tag  the file is over anyway  It is valid HTML and it can be parsed perfectly    It will create more readable  less boilerplate code and you don t lose a thing  HTML parsers work good   And when you are done  move on to HTML5  It is better

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If you can only think of one way to do it  don t do it   Whether it s an interface layout  a task flow  or a block of code  just stop   Do something to collect more ideas  like asking other people how they would do it  and don t go back to implementing until you have at least three completely different ideas and at least one crisis of confidence   Generally  when I think something can only be done one way  or think only one method has any merit  it s because I haven t thought through the factors which ought to be influencing the design thoroughly enough   If I had  some of them would clearly be in conflict  leading to a mess and thus an actual decision rather than a rote default   Being a solid programmer does not make you a solid interface designer  And following all of the interface guidelines in the world will only begin to help   If it s even humanly possible     There seems to be a peculiar addiction to making things  cute  and  clever

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How about this one   Garbage collectors actually hurt programmers  productivity and make resource leaks harder to find and fix  Note that I am talking about resouces in general  and not only memory

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Most professional programmers suck  I have come across too many people doing this job for their living who were plain crappy at what they were doing  Crappy code  bad communication skills  no interest in new technology whatsoever  Too many  too many

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System Data DataSet Rocks   Strongly-typed DataSets are better  in my opinion  than custom DDD objects for most business applications   Reasoning  We re bending over backwards to figure out Unit of Work on custom objects  LINQ to SQL  Entity Framework and it s adding complexity  Use a nice code generator from somewhere to generate the data layer and the Unit of Work sits on the object collections  DataTable and DataSet --no mystery

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Singletons are not evil  There is a place for singletons in the real world  and methods to get around them  i e  monostate pattern  are simply singletons in disguise  For instance  a Logger is a perfect candidate for a singleton  Addtionally  so is a message pump  My current app uses distributed computing  and different objects need to be able to send appropriate messages  There should only be one message pump  and everyone should be able to access it  The alternative is passing an object to my message pump everywhere it might be needed and hoping that a new developer doesn t new one up without thinking and wonder why his messages are going nowhere  The uniqueness of the singleton is the most important part  not its availability  The singleton has its place in the world

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Performance does matter

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As most others here  I try to adhere to principles like DRY and not being a human compiler   Another strategy I want to push is  tell  don t ask   Instead of cluttering all objects with getters setters essentially making a sieve of them  I d like to tell them to do stuff   This seems to got straight against good enterprise practices with dumb entity objects and thicker service layer that does plenty of asking   Hmmm  thoughts

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Don t worry too much about what language to learn  use the industry heavy weights like c  or python  Languages like Ruby are fun in the bedroom  but don t do squat in workplace scenarios  Languages like c  and Java can handle small to the very large software projects  If anyone says otherwise  then your talking about a scripting language  Period   Before starting a project  consider how much support and code samples are available on the net  Again  choosing a language like Ruby which has very few code samples on the web compared to Java for example  will only cause you grief further down the road when your stuck on a problem   You can t post a message on a forum and expect an answer back while your boss is asking you how your coding is going  What are you going to say   I m waiting for someone to help me out on this forum   Learn one language and learn it good  Learning multiple languages may carry over skills and practices  but you ll only even be OK at all of them  Be good at one  There are entire books dedicated to Threading in Java which  when you think about it  is only one namespace out of over 100   Master one or be ok at lots

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I also think there s nothing wrong with having binaries in source control   if there is a good reason for it   If I have an assembly I don t have the source for  and might not necessarily be in the same place on each devs machine  then I will usually stick it in a  binaries  directory and reference it in a project using a relative path     Quite a lot of people seem to think I should be burned at the stake for even mentioning  source control  and  binary  in the same sentence   I even know of places that have strict rules saying you can t add them

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Programming is in its infancy     Even though programming languages and methodologies have been evolving very quickly for years now  we still have a long way to go   The signs are clear      Language Documentation is spread haphazardly across the internet  stackoverflow is helping here   Languages cannot evolve syntactically without breaking prior versions  Debugging is still often done with printf  Language libraries or other forms of large scale code reuse are still pretty rare    Clearly all of these are improving  but it would be nice if we all could agree that this is the beginning and not the end

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in almost all cases  comments are evil  http   gooddeveloper wordpress com

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Programming is in its infancy     Even though programming languages and methodologies have been evolving very quickly for years now  we still have a long way to go   The signs are clear      Language Documentation is spread haphazardly across the internet  stackoverflow is helping here   Languages cannot evolve syntactically without breaking prior versions  Debugging is still often done with printf  Language libraries or other forms of large scale code reuse are still pretty rare    Clearly all of these are improving  but it would be nice if we all could agree that this is the beginning and not the end

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If your text editor doesn t do good code completion  you re wasting everyone s time   Quickly remembering thousands of argument lists  spellings  and return values  not to mention class structures and similarly complex organizational patterns  is a task computers are good at and people  comparatively  are not  I buy wholeheartedly that slowing yourself down a bit and avoiding the gadget feature cult is a great way to increase efficiency and avoid bugs  but there is simply no benefit to spending 30 seconds hunting unnecessarily through sourcecode or docs when you could spend nil    especially if you just need a spelling  which is more often than we like to admit    Granted  if there isn t an editor that provides this functionality for your language  or the task is simple enough to knock out in the time it would take to load a heavier editor  nobody is going to tell you that Eclipse and 90 plugins is the right tool  But please don t tell me that the ability to H-J-K-L your way around like it s 1999 really saves you more time than hitting escape every time you need a method signature    even if you do feel less  hacker  doing it   Thoughts

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My controversial opinion  Object Oriented Programming is absolutely the worst thing that s ever happened to the field of software engineering   The primary problem with OOP is the total lack of a rigorous definition that everyone can agree on  This easily leads to implementations that have logical holes in them  or language like Java that adhere to this bizarre religious dogma about what OOP means  while forcing the programmer into doing all these contortions and  design patterns  just to work around the limitations of a particular OOP system   So  OOP tricks the programmer into thinking they re making these huge productivity gains  that OOP is somehow a  natural  way to think  while forcing the programmer to type boatloads of unnecessary boilerplate   Then since nobody knows what OOP actually means  we get vast amounts of time wasted on petty arguments about whether language X or Y is  truly OOP  or not  what bizarre cargo cultish language features are absolutely  essential  for a language to be considered  truly OOP    Instead of demanding that this language or that language be  truly oop   we should be looking at what language features are shown by experiment  to actually increase productivity  instead of trying to force it into being some imagined ideal language  or indeed forcing our programs to conform to some platonic ideal of a  truly object oriented program    Instead of insisting that our programs conform to some platonic ideal of  Truly object oriented   how about we focus on adhering to good engineering principles  making our code easy to read and understand  and using the features of a language that are productive and helpful  regardless of whether they are  OOP  enough or not

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Jon Bentley s  Programming Pearls  is no longer a useful tome   http   tinyurl com nom56r

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Getters and Setters are Highly Overused  I ve seen millions of people claiming that public fields are evil  so they make them private and provide getters and setters for all of them  I believe this is almost identical to making the fields public  maybe a bit different if you re using threads  but generally is not the case  or if your accessors have business presentation logic  something  strange  at least    I m not in favor of public fields  but against making a getter setter  or Property  for everyone of them  and then claiming that doing that is encapsulation or information hiding    ha   UPDATE   This answer has raised some controversy in it s comments  so I ll try to clarify it a bit  I ll leave the original untouched since that is what many people upvoted    First of all  anyone who uses public fields deserves jail time  Now  creating private fields and then using the IDE to automatically generate getters and setters for every one of them is nearly as bad as using public fields   Many people think   private fields   public accessors    encapsulation  I say  automatic or not  generation of getter setter pair for your fields effectively goes against the so called encapsulation you are trying to achieve   Lastly  let me quote Uncle Bob in this topic  taken from chapter 6 of  Clean Code        There is a reason that we keep our   variables private  We don t want   anyone else to depend on them  We want   the freedom to change their type or   implementation on a whim or an   impulse  Why  then  do so many   programmers automatically add getters   and setters to their objects  exposing   their private fields as if they were   public

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A degree in computer science does not---and is not supposed to---teach you to be a programmer   Programming is a trade  computer science is a field of study   You can be a great programmer and a poor computer scientist and a great computer scientist and an awful programmer   It is important to understand the difference   If you want to be a programmer  learn Java   If you want to be a computer scientist  learn at least three almost completely different languages   e g   assembler  c  lisp  ruby  smalltalk

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Any sufficiently capable library is too complicated to be useable and any library simple enough to be usable lacks that capabilities needed to be a good general solution   I run in to this constantly   Exhaustive libraries that are so complicated to use I tear my hair out and simple easy to use libraries that don t quite do what I need them to do

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Defects and Enhancement Requests are the Same  Unless you are developing software on a fixed-price contract  there should be no difference when prioritizing your backlog between  bugs  and  enhancements  and  new feature  requests  OK - maybe that s not controversial  but I have worked on enterprise IT projects where the edict was that  all open bugs must be fixed in the next release   even if that left no developer time for the most desirable new features  So  a problem which was encountered by 1  of the users  1  of the time took precedence over a new feature would might be immediately useful to 90  of the users   I like to take my entire project backlog  put estimates around each item and take it to the user community for prioritization - with items not classified as  defect    enhancement   etc

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Women make better programmers than men   The female programmers I ve worked with don t get wedded to  their  code as much as men do  They re much more open to criticism and new ideas

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Sometimes you have to denormalize your databases   An opinion that doesn t go well with most programmers but you have to sacrifice things like noramlization for performance sometimes

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Development is 80  about the design and 20  about coding  I believe that developers should spend 80  of time designing at the fine level of detail  what they are going to build and only 20  actually coding what they ve designed  This will produce code with near zero bugs and save a lot on test-fix-retest cycle   Getting to the metal  or IDE  early is like premature optimization  which is know to be a root of all evil  Thoughtful upfront design  I m not necessarily talking about enormous design document  simple drawings on white board will work as well  will yield much better results than just coding and fixing

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Java is the COBOL of our generation   Everyone learns to code it  There code for it running in big companies that will try to keep it running for decades  Everyone comes to despise it compared to all the other choices out there but are forced to use it anyway because it pays the bills

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To Be A Good Programmer really requires working in multiple aspects of the field   Application development  Systems  Kernel  work  User Interface Design  Database  and so on   There are certain approaches common to all  and certain approaches that are specific to one aspect of the job   You need to learn how to program Java like a Java coder  not like a C   coder and vice versa   User Interface design is really hard  and uses a different part of your brain than coding  but implementing that UI in code is yet another skill as well   It is not just that there is no  one  approach to coding  but there is not just one type of coding

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Use type inference anywhere and everywhere possible     Edit    Here is a link to a blog entry I wrote several months ago about why I feel this way    http   blogs msdn com jaredpar archive 2008 09 09 when-to-use-type-inference aspx

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A degree in Computer Science or other IT area DOES make you a more well rounded programmer  I don t care how many years of experience you have  how many blogs you ve read  how many open source projects you re involved in   A qualification  I d recommend longer than 3 years  exposes you to a different way of thinking and gives you a great foundation   Just because you ve written some better code than a guy with a BSc in Computer Science  does not mean you are better than him   What you have he can pick up in an instant which is not the case the other way around   Having a qualification shows your commitment  the fact that you would go above and beyond experience to make you a better developer   Developers which are good at what they do AND have a qualification can be very intimidating   I would not be surprized if this answer gets voted down      Also  once you have a qualification  you slowly stop comparing yourself to those with qualifications  my experience    You realize that it all doesn t matter at the end  as long as you can work well together   Always act mercifully towards other developers  irrespective of qualifications

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Sometimes jumping on the bandwagon is ok  I get tired of people exhibiting  grandpa syndrome    You kids and your newfangled Test Driven Development   Every big technology that s come out in the last decade has sucked   Back in my day  we wrote real code      you get the idea    Sometimes things that are popular are popular for a reason

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1  The Business Apps farce   I think that the whole  Enterprise  frameworks thing is smoke and mirrors  J2EE   NET  the majority of the Apache frameworks and most abstractions to manage such things create far more complexity than they solve   Take any regular Java or  NET ORM  or any supposedly modern MVC framework for either which does  magic  to solve tedious  simple tasks  You end up writing huge amounts of ugly XML boilerplate that is difficult to validate and write quickly  You have massive APIs where half of those are just to integrate the work of the other APIs  interfaces that are impossible to recycle  and abstract classes that are needed only to overcome the inflexibility of Java and C   We simply don t need most of that   How about all the different application servers with their own darned descriptor syntax  the overly complex database and groupware products   The point of this is not that complexity  bad  it s that unnecessary complexity  bad  I ve worked in massive enterprise installations where some of it was necessary  but even in most cases a few home-grown scripts and a simple web frontend is all that s needed to solve most use cases   I d try to replace all of these enterprisey apps with simple web frameworks  open source DBs  and trivial programming constructs   2  The n-years-of-experience-required   Unless you need a consultant or a technician to handle a specific issue related to an application  API or framework  then you don t really need someone with 5 years of experience in that application  What you need is a developer admin who can read documentation  who has domain knowledge in whatever it is you re doing  and who can learn quickly  If you need to develop in some kind of language  a decent developer will pick it up in less than 2 months  If you need an administrator for X web server  in two days he should have read the man pages and newsgroups and be up to speed  Anything less and that person is not worth what he is paid   3  The common  computer science  degree curriculum   The majority of computer science and software engineering degrees are bull  If your first programming language is Java or C   then you re doing something wrong  If you don t get several courses full of algebra and math  it s wrong  If you don t delve into functional programming  it s incomplete  If you can t apply loop invariants to a trivial for loop  you re not worth your salt as a supposed computer scientist  If you come out with experience in x and y languages and object orientation  it s full of s     A real computer scientist sees a language in terms of the concepts and syntaxes it uses  and sees programming methodologies as one among many  and has such a good understanding of the underlying philosophies of both that picking new languages  design methods  or specification languages should be trivial

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It s okay to be Mort  Not everyone is a  rockstar  programmer  some of us do it because it s a good living  and we don t care about all the latest fads and trends  we just want to do our jobs

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It s a good idea to keep optimisation in mind when developing code   Whenever I say this  people always reply   premature optimisation is the root of all evil    But I m not saying optimise before you debug   I m not even saying optimise ever  but when you re designing code  bear in mind the possibility that this might become a bottleneck  and write it so that it will be possible to refactor it for speed  without tearing the API apart   Hugo

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It IS possible to secure your application   Every time someone asks a question about how to either prevent users from pirating their app  or secure it from hackers  the answer is that it s impossible  Nonsense  If you truly believe that  then leave your doors unlocked  or just take them off the house    And don t bother going to the doctor  either  You re mortal - trying to cure a sickness is just postponing the inevitable   Just because someone might be able to pirate your app or hack your system doesn t mean you shouldn t try to reduce the number of people who will do so  What you re really doing is making it require more work to break in than the intruder pirate is willing to do    Just like a deadbolt and ADT on your house will keep the burglars out  reasonable anti-piracy and security measures will keep hackers and pirates out of your way  Of course  the more tempting it would be for them to break in  the more security you need

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In my workplace  I ve been trying to introduce more Agile XP development habits   Continuous Design is the one I ve felt most resistance on so far   Maybe I shouldn t have phrased it as  let s round up all of the architecture team and shoot them

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Two lines of code is too many   If a method has a second line of code  it is a code smell   Refactor

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Use unit tests as a last resort to verify code   If you I want to verify that code is correct  I prefer the following techniques over unit testing     Type checking Assertions Trivially verifiable code   For everything else  there s unit tests

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Not very controversial AFAIK but    AJAX was around way before the term was coined and everyone needs to  let it go    People were using it for all sorts of things   No one really cared about it though   Then suddenly POW   Someone coined the term and everyone jumped on the AJAX bandwagon   Suddenly people are now experts in AJAX  as if  experts  in dynamically loading data weren t around before   I think its one of the biggest contributing factors that is leading to the brutal destruction of the internet   That and  Web 2 0

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Java is not the best thing out there  Just because it comes with an  Enterprise  sticker does not make it good  Nor does it make it fast  Nor does it make it the answer to every question   Also  ROR is not all it is cracked up to be by the Blogsphere   While I am at it  OOP is not always good  In fact  I think it is usually bad

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VB 6 could be used for good as well as evil  It was a Rapid Application Development environment in a time of over complicated coding   I have hated VB vehemently in the past  and still mock VB NET  probably in jest  as a Fisher Price language due to my dislike of classical VB  but in its day  nothing could beat it for getting the job done

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Unit Testing won t help you write good code  The only reason to have Unit tests is to make sure that code that already works doesn t break   Writing tests first  or writing code to the tests is ridiculous   If you write to the tests before the code  you won t even know what the edge cases are  You could have code that passes the tests but still fails in unforeseen circumstances   And furthermore  good developers will keep cohesion low  which will make the addition of new code unlikely to cause problems with existing stuff   In fact  I ll generalize that even further    Most  Best Practices  in Software Engineering are there to keep bad programmers from doing too much damage    They re there to hand-hold bad developers and keep them from making dumbass mistakes  Of course  since most developers are bad  this is a good thing  but good developers should get a pass

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How about this one   Garbage collectors actually hurt programmers  productivity and make resource leaks harder to find and fix  Note that I am talking about resouces in general  and not only memory

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Classes should fit on the screen   If you have to use the scroll bar to see all of your class  your class is too big     Code folding and miniature fonts are cheating

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Development projects are bound to fail unless the team of programmers is given as a whole complete empowerment to make all decisions related to the technology being used

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Useful and clean high-level abstractions are significantly more important than performance  one example   Too often I watch peers spending hours writing over complicated Sprocs  or massive LINQ queries which return unintuitive anonymous types for the sake of  performance    They could achieve almost the same performance but with considerably cleaner  intuitive code

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Software-Reuse is the most important way to optimize software-development  Somehow  software-reuse seamed to be in vogue for some time  but has lost it s charm  when many companies found out that just writing powerpoint presentations with reuse slogans doesn t actually help  They reasoned that software-reuse is just not  good enough  and can t live up to their dreams  So it seams that it is not in vogue any more -- it was replaced by plenty of project management newcomers  Agile for example    The fact is  that any really good developer by himself performs some kind of software-reuse  I would say Any developer  not doing software-reuse is a bad developer   I have experienced myself  how much software-reuse can produce performance and stability in development  But of course  a set of PowerPoints and half-hearted confessions of management does not suffice to get its full potential in a company   I have linked a very old article of mine about software-reuse  see title   It was originally written in German and translated thereafter -- so excuse please  when it is not that good writing

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A random collection of Cook s aphorisms      The hardest language to learn is your second  The hardest OS to learn is your second one - especially if your first was an IBM mainframe  Once you ve learned several seemingly different languages  you finally realize that all programming languages are the same - just minor differences in syntax  Although one can be quite productive and marketable without having learned any assembly  no one will ever have a visceral understanding of computing without it  Debuggers are the final refuge for programmers who don t really know what they re doing in the first place  No OS will ever be stable if it doesn t make use of hardware memory management  Low level systems programming is much  much easier than applications programming  The programmer who has a favorite language is just playing  Write the User s Guide FIRST  Policy and procedure are intended for those who lack the initiative to perform otherwise   The Contractor s Creed   Tell em what they need  Give em what they want  Make sure the check clears  If you don t find programming fun  get out of it or accept that although you may make a living at it  you ll never be more than average  Just as the old farts have to learn the  NET method names  you ll have to learn the library calls   But there s nothing new there  The life of a programmer is one of constantly adapting to different environments  and the more tools you have hung on your belt  the more versatile and marketable you ll be  You may piddle around a bit with little code chunks near the beginning to try out some ideas  but  in general  one doesn t start coding in earnest until you KNOW how the whole program or app is going to be layed out  and you KNOW that the whole thing is going to work EXACTLY as advertised   For most projects with at least some degree of complexity  I generally end up spending 60 to 70 percent of the time up front just percolating ideas  Understand that programming has little to do with language and everything to do with algorithm  All of those nifty geegaws with memorable acronyms that folks have come up with over the years are just different ways of skinning the implementation cat   When you strip away all the OOPiness  RADology  Development Methodology 37  and Best Practice 42  you still have to deal with the basic building blocks of    assignments conditionals iterations control flow I O    Once you can truly wrap yourself around that  you ll eventually get to the point where you see  from a programming standpoint  little difference between writing an inventory app for an auto parts company  a graphical real-time TCP performance analyzer  a mathematical model of a stellar core  or an appointments calendar    Beginning programmers work with small chunks of code   As they gain experience  they work with ever increasingly large chunks of code  As they gain even more experience  they work with small chunks of code

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Most developers don t have a clue  Yup    there you go  I ve said it  I find that from all the developers that I personally know    just a handful are actually good  Just a handful understand that code should be tested     that the Object Oriented approach to developing is actually there to help you  It frustrates me to no end that there are people who get the title of developer while in fact all they can do is copy and paste a bit of source code and then execute it   Anyway     I m glad initiatives like stackoverflow are being started  It s good for developers to wonder  Is there a better way  Am I doing it correctly  Perhaps I could use this technique to speed things up  etc      But nope     the majority of developers just learn a language that they are required by their job and stick with it until they themselves become old and grumpy developers that have no clue what s going on  All they ll get is a big paycheck since they are simply older than you   Ah well     life is unjust in the IT community and I ll be taking steps to ignore such people in the future  Hooray

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That the  clarification of ideas  should not be the sole responsibility of the developer   and yes xkcd made me use that specific phrase     To often we are handed project s that are specified in psuedo-meta-sorta-kinda-specific  code  if you want to call it that   There are often product managers who draw up the initial requiements for a project and perform next to 0  of basic logic validation   I m not saying that the technical approach shouldn t be drawn up by the architect  or that the speicifc implemntation shouldn t be the responsibility of the developer  but rather that it should the requirement of the product manager to ensure that their requirements are logically feasible   Personally I ve been involved in too many  simple  projects that encounter a little scope creep here and there and then come across a  small  change or feature addition which contradicts previous requirements--whether implicitly or explicitly   In these cases it is all too easy for the person requesting the borderline-impossible change to become enraged that developers can t make their dream a reality

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The vast majority of software being developed does not involve the end-user when gathering requirements   Usually it s just some managers who are providing  requirements

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If you only know one language  no matter how well you know it  you re not a great programmer   There seems to be an attitude that says once you re really good at C  or Java or whatever other language you started out learning then that s all you need  I don t believe it- every language I have ever learned has taught me something new about programming that I have been able to bring back into my work with all the others  I think that anyone who restricts themselves to one language will never be as good as they could be   It also indicates to me a certain lack of inquistiveness and willingness to experiment that doesn t necessarily tally with the qualities I would expect to find in a really good programmer

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Opinion  Data driven design puts the cart before the horse  It should be eliminated from our thinking forthwith   The vast majority of software isn t about the data  it s about the business problem we re trying to solve for our customers  It s about a problem domain  which involves objects  rules  flows  cases  and relationships    When we start our design with the data  and model the rest of the system after the data and the relationships between the data  tables  foreign keys  and x-to-x relationships   we constrain the entire application to how the data is stored in and retrieved from the database  Further  we expose the database architecture to the software   The database schema is an implementation detail  We should be free to change it without having to significantly alter the design of our software at all  The business layer should never have to know how the tables are set up  or if it s pulling from a view or a table  or getting the table from dynamic SQL or a stored procedure  And that type of code should never appear in the presentation layer   Software is about solving business problems  We deal with users  cars  accounts  balances  averages  summaries  transfers  animals  messsages  packages  carts  orders  and all sorts of other real tangible objects  and the actions we can perform on them  We need to save  load  update  find  and delete those items as needed  Sometimes  we have to do those things in special ways    But there s no real compelling reason that we should take the work that should be done in the database and move it away from the data and put it in the source code  potentially on a separate machine  introducing network traffic and degrading performance   Doing so means turning our backs on the decades of work that has already been done to improve the performance of stored procedures and functions built into databases  The argument that stored procedures introduce  yet another API  to be manged is specious  of course it does  that API is a facade that shields you from the database schema  including the intricate details of primary and foreign keys  transactions  cursors  and so on  and it prevents you from having to splice SQL together in your source code   Put the horse back in front of the cart  Think about the problem domain  and design the solution around it  Then  derive the data from the problem domain

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There is a difference between a programmer and a developer   An example  a programmer writes pagination logic  a developer integrates pagination on a page

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Two brains think better than one  I firmly believe that pair programming is the number one factor when it comes to increasing code quality and programming productivity  Unfortunatly it is also a highly controversial for management who believes that  more hands    more code

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Don t call virtual methods from constructors    This is only sometimes a PITA  but is only so because in C  I cannot decide at which point in a constructor to call my base class s constructor   Why not   The  NET framework allows it  so what good reason is there for C  to not allow it   Damn

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Architects that do not code are useless   That sounds a little harsh  but it s not unreasonable  If you are the  architect  for a system  but do not have some amount of hands-on involvement with the technologies employed then how do you get the respect of the development team  How do you influence direction   Architects need to do a lot more  meet with stakeholders  negotiate with other teams  evaluate vendors  write documentation  give presentations  etc   But  if you never see code checked in from by your architect    be wary

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Greater-than operators         should be deprecated  I tried coding with a preference for less-than over greater-than for awhile and it stuck  I don t want to go back  and indeed I feel that everyone should do it my way in this case   Consider common mathematical  range  notation   0  lt   i  lt  10  That s easy to approximate in code now and you get used to seeing the idiom where the variable is repeated in the middle joined by  amp  amp    if  0  lt   i  amp  amp  i  lt  10      return true  else     return false    Once you get used to that pattern  you ll never look at silliness like   if      i  lt  0    i  gt   9       return true    the same way again   Long sequences of relations become a bit easier to work with because the operands tend towards nondecreasing order   Furthermore  a preference for operator lt  is enshrined in the C   standards  In some cases operator  is defined in terms of it   as   a lt b    b lt a

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Junior programmers should be assigned to doing object  module design and design maintenance for several months before they are allowed to actually write or modify code   Too many programmers developers make it to the 5 and 10 year marks without understanding the elements of good design  It can be crippling later when they want to advance beyond just writing and maintaining code

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In my workplace  I ve been trying to introduce more Agile XP development habits   Continuous Design is the one I ve felt most resistance on so far   Maybe I shouldn t have phrased it as  let s round up all of the architecture team and shoot them

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Uncommented code is the bane of humanity   I think that comments are necessary for code   They visually divide it up into logical parts  and provide an alternative representation when reading code   Documentation comments are the bare minimum  but using comments to split up longer functions helps when writing new code and allows quicker analysis when returning to existing code

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Design patterns are bad   Actually  design patterns aren t   You can write bad code  and bury it under a pile of patterns  Use singletons as global variables  and states as goto s  Whatever   A design pattern is a standard solution for a particular problem  but requires you to understand the problem first  If you don t  design patterns become a part of the problem for the next developer

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Less code is better than more   If the users say  that s it    and your work remains invisible  it s done right   Glory can be found elsewhere

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You must know how to type to be a programmer   It s controversial among people who don t know how to type  but who insist that they can two-finger hunt-and-peck as fast as any typist  or that they don t really need to spend that much time typing  or that Intellisense relieves the need to type     I ve never met anyone who does know how to type  but insists that it doesn t make a difference   See also   Programming s Dirtiest Little Secret

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If it isn t worth testing  it isn t worth building

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Lower level languages are inappropriate for most problems

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My controversial opinion  Java doesn t suck but Java API s do  Why do java libraries insist on making it hard to do simple tasks  And why  instead of fixing the APIs  do they create frameworks to help manage the boilerplate code  This opinion can apply to any language that requires 10 or more lines of code to read a line from a file

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New web projects should consider not using Java   I ve been using Java to do web development for over 10 years now   At first  it was a step in the right direction compared to the available alternatives   Now  there are better alternatives than Java   This is really just a specific case of the magic hammer approach to problem solving  but it s one that s really painful

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Tcl Tk is the best GUI language toolkit combo ever  It may lack specific widgets and be less good-looking than the new kids on the block  but its model is elegant and so easy to use that one can build working GUIs faster by typing commands interactively than by using a visual interface builder  Its expressive power is unbeatable  other solutions  Gtk  Java   NET  MFC     typically require ten to one hundred LOC to get the same result as a Tcl Tk one-liner  All without even sacrificing readability or stability   pack  label  l -text  Hello world     button  b -text  Quit  -command exit

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90 percent of programmers are pretty damn bad programmers  and virtually all of us have absolutely no tools to evaluate our current ability level  although we can generally look back and realize how bad we USED to suck   I wasn t going to post this because it pisses everyone off and I m not really trying for a negative score or anything  but   A  isn t that the point of the question  and   B  Most of the  Answers  in this thread prove this point  I heard a great analogy the other day   Programming abilities vary AT LEAST as much as sports abilities   How many of us could jump into a professional team and actually improve their chances

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VB sucks While not terribly controversial in general  when you work in a VB house it is

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Sometimes it s appropriate to swallow an exception   For UI bells and wistles  prompting the user with an error message is interuptive  and there is ussually nothing for them to do anyway   In this case  I just log it  and deal with it when it shows up in the logs

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Women make better programmers than men   The female programmers I ve worked with don t get wedded to  their  code as much as men do  They re much more open to criticism and new ideas

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XHTML is evil  Write HTML   You will have to set the MIME type to text html anyway  so why fooling yourself into believing that you are really writing XML  Whoever is going to download your page is going to believe that it is HTML  so make it HTML    And with that  feel free and happy to not close your  lt li   it isn t necessary  Don t close the html tag  the file is over anyway  It is valid HTML and it can be parsed perfectly    It will create more readable  less boilerplate code and you don t lose a thing  HTML parsers work good   And when you are done  move on to HTML5  It is better

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What strikes me as amusing about this question is that I ve just read the first page of answers  and so far  I haven t found a single controversial opinion    Perhaps that says more about the way stackoverflow generates consensus than anything else  Maybe I should have started at the bottom   -

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Dependency Management Software Does More Harm Than Good  I ve worked on Java projects that included upwards of a hundred different libraries  In most cases  each library has its own dependencies  and those dependent libraries have their own dependencies too   Software like Maven or Ivy supposedly  manage  this problem by automatically fetching the correct version of each library and then recursively fetching all of its dependencies   Problem solved  right   Wrong   Downloading libraries is the easy part of dependency management  The hard part is creating a mental model of the software  and how it interacts with all those libraries   My unpopular opinion is this   If you can t verbally explain  off the top of your head  the basic interactions between all the libraries in your project  you should eliminate dependencies until you can   Along the same lines  if it takes you longer than ten seconds to list all of the libraries  and their methods  invoked either directly or indirectly from one of your functions  then you are doing a poor job of managing dependencies   You should be able to easily answer the question  which parts of my application actually depend on library XYZ    The current crop of dependency management tools do more harm than good  because they make it easy to create impossibly-complicated dependency graphs  and they provide virtually no functionality for reducing dependencies or identifying problems   I ve seen developers include 10 or 20 MB worth of libraries  introducing thousands of dependent classes into the project  just to eliminate a few dozen lines of simple custom code   Using libraries and frameworks can be good  But there s always a cost  and tools which obscure that cost are inherently problematic   Moreover  it s sometimes  note  certainly not always  better to reinvent the wheel by writing a few small classes that implement exactly what you need than to introduce a dependency on a large general-purpose library

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Opinion  That frameworks and third part components should be only used as a last resort   I often see programmers immediately pick a framework to accomplish a task without learning the underlying approach it takes to work   Something will inevitably break  or we ll find a limition we didn t account for and we ll be immediately stuck and have to rethink major part of a system   Frameworks are fine to use as long it is carefully thought out

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Before January 1st 1970  true and false were the other way around

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Dependency Management Software Does More Harm Than Good  I ve worked on Java projects that included upwards of a hundred different libraries  In most cases  each library has its own dependencies  and those dependent libraries have their own dependencies too   Software like Maven or Ivy supposedly  manage  this problem by automatically fetching the correct version of each library and then recursively fetching all of its dependencies   Problem solved  right   Wrong   Downloading libraries is the easy part of dependency management  The hard part is creating a mental model of the software  and how it interacts with all those libraries   My unpopular opinion is this   If you can t verbally explain  off the top of your head  the basic interactions between all the libraries in your project  you should eliminate dependencies until you can   Along the same lines  if it takes you longer than ten seconds to list all of the libraries  and their methods  invoked either directly or indirectly from one of your functions  then you are doing a poor job of managing dependencies   You should be able to easily answer the question  which parts of my application actually depend on library XYZ    The current crop of dependency management tools do more harm than good  because they make it easy to create impossibly-complicated dependency graphs  and they provide virtually no functionality for reducing dependencies or identifying problems   I ve seen developers include 10 or 20 MB worth of libraries  introducing thousands of dependent classes into the project  just to eliminate a few dozen lines of simple custom code   Using libraries and frameworks can be good  But there s always a cost  and tools which obscure that cost are inherently problematic   Moreover  it s sometimes  note  certainly not always  better to reinvent the wheel by writing a few small classes that implement exactly what you need than to introduce a dependency on a large general-purpose library

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Programmers who spend all day answering questions on Stackoverflow are probably not doing the work they are being paid to do

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Software is like toilet paper  The less you spend on it  the bigger of a pain in the ass it is   That is to say  outsourcing is rarely a good idea   I ve always figured this to be true  but I never really knew the extent of it until recently  I have been  maintaining   read   fixing   some off-shored code recently  and it is a huge mess  It is easily costing our company more than the difference had it been developed in-house   People outside your business will inherently know less about your business model  and therefore will not do as good a job programming any system that works within your business  Also  they know they won t have to support it  so there s no incentive to do anything other than half-ass it

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Manually halting a program is an effective  proven way to find performance problems   Believable  Not to most  True  Absolutely   Programmers are far more judgmental than necessary   Witness all the things considered  evil  or  horrible  in these posts   Programmers are data-structure-happy   Witness all the discussions of classes  inheritance  private-vs-public  memory management  etc   versus how to analyze requirements

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Non-development staff should not be allowed to manage development staff   Correction  Staff with zero development experience should not be allowed to manage development staff

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If I were being controversial  I d have to suggest that Jon Skeet isn t omnipotent

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Most professional programmers suck  I have come across too many people doing this job for their living who were plain crappy at what they were doing  Crappy code  bad communication skills  no interest in new technology whatsoever  Too many  too many

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Source Control  Anything But SourceSafe  Also  Exclusive locking is evil   I once worked somewhere where they argued that exclusive locks meant that you were guaranteeing that people were not overwriting someone else s changes when you checked in  The problem was that in order to get any work done  if a file was locked devs would just change their local file to writable and merging  or overwriting  the source control with their version when they had the chance

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There is no such thing as Object-Oriented programming

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Don t write code  remove code   As a smart teacher once told me   Don t write code  Writing code is bad  Removing code is good  and if you have to write code - write small code

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The best programmers trace all their code in the debugger and test all paths   Well    the OP said controversial

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Women make better programmers than men   The female programmers I ve worked with don t get wedded to  their  code as much as men do  They re much more open to criticism and new ideas

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USE of Desgin patterns and documentation   in web devlopment whats use of these things never felt any use of it

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A degree in computer science does not---and is not supposed to---teach you to be a programmer   Programming is a trade  computer science is a field of study   You can be a great programmer and a poor computer scientist and a great computer scientist and an awful programmer   It is important to understand the difference   If you want to be a programmer  learn Java   If you want to be a computer scientist  learn at least three almost completely different languages   e g   assembler  c  lisp  ruby  smalltalk

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Programmers take their  own little limited stupid  programming language as a sacrosanct religion   Its so funny how programmers take these discussions almost like religious believers do  no critics allowed   often  no objective discussion   very often  arguing based upon very limited  or absent knowledge and information  For a confirmation  just read the previous answers  and especially the comments   Also funny and another confirmation  by definition of the question  give me a controversial opinion   any controversion opinion should NOT qualify for negative votes - actually the opposite  the more controversial  the better  But how do our programmers react  like Pavlov s dogs  voting negative on disliked opinions   PS  I upvoted some others for fairness

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Design patterns are a waste of time when it comes to software design and development   Don t get me wrong  design patterns are useful but mainly as a communication vector  They can express complex ideas very concisely  factory  singleton  iterator     But they shouldn t serve as a development method  Too often developers architect their code using a flurry of design pattern-based classes where a more concise design would be better  both in term of readability and performance  All that with the illusion that individual classes could be reused outside their domain  If a class is not designed for reuse or isn t part of the interface  then it s an implementation detail   Design patterns should be used to put names on organizational features  not to dictate the way code must be written    It was supposed to be controversial  remember

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Software Architects Designers are Overrated  As a developer  I hate the idea of Software Architects  They are basically people that no longer code full time  read magazines and articles  and then tell you how to design software  Only people that actually write software full time for a living should be doing that  I don t care if you were the worlds best coder 5 years ago before you became an Architect  your opinion is useless to me   How s that for controversial   Edit  to clarify   I think most Software Architects make great Business Analysts  talking with customers  writing requirements  tests  etc   I simply think they have no place in designing software  high level or otherwise

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Understanding  what  to do is at least as important as knowing  how  to do it  and almost always it s much more important than knowing the  best  way to solve a problem   Domain-specific knowledge is often crucial to write good software

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The best code is often the code you don t write   As programmers we want to solve every problem by writing some cool method   Anytime we can solve a problem and still give the users 80  of what they want without introducing more code to maintain and test we have provided waaaay more value

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Here s one which has seemed obvious to me for many years but is anathema to everyone else  it is almost always a mistake to switch off C  or C    assertions with NDEBUG in  release  builds   The sole exceptions are where the time or space penalty is unacceptable      Rationale   If an assertion fails  your program has entered a state which    has never been tested the developer was unable to code a recovery strategy for the developer has effectively documented as being inconceivable    Yet somehow  industry best practice  is that the thing should just muddle on and hope for the best when it comes to live runs with your customers  data

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Getters and Setters are Highly Overused  I ve seen millions of people claiming that public fields are evil  so they make them private and provide getters and setters for all of them  I believe this is almost identical to making the fields public  maybe a bit different if you re using threads  but generally is not the case  or if your accessors have business presentation logic  something  strange  at least    I m not in favor of public fields  but against making a getter setter  or Property  for everyone of them  and then claiming that doing that is encapsulation or information hiding    ha   UPDATE   This answer has raised some controversy in it s comments  so I ll try to clarify it a bit  I ll leave the original untouched since that is what many people upvoted    First of all  anyone who uses public fields deserves jail time  Now  creating private fields and then using the IDE to automatically generate getters and setters for every one of them is nearly as bad as using public fields   Many people think   private fields   public accessors    encapsulation  I say  automatic or not  generation of getter setter pair for your fields effectively goes against the so called encapsulation you are trying to achieve   Lastly  let me quote Uncle Bob in this topic  taken from chapter 6 of  Clean Code        There is a reason that we keep our   variables private  We don t want   anyone else to depend on them  We want   the freedom to change their type or   implementation on a whim or an   impulse  Why  then  do so many   programmers automatically add getters   and setters to their objects  exposing   their private fields as if they were   public

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Opinion  developers should be testing their own code  I ve seen too much crap handed off to test only to have it not actually fix the bug in question  incurring communication overhead and fostering irresponsible practices

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Xah Lee  actually has some pretty noteworthy and legitimate viewpoints if you can filter out all the invective  and rationally evaluate statements without agreeing  or disagreeing  based solely on the personality behind the statements  A lot of my  controversial  viewpoints have been echoed by him  and other notorious  trolls  who have criticized languages or tools I use d  on a regular basis   Documentation Generators  http   en wikipedia or  wiki Comparison of documentation generators       the kind where the creator invented some custom-made especially-for-documenting-sourcecode roll-your-own syntax  including  but not limited to JavaDoc  are totally superfluous and a waste of time because    1  They are underused by the people who should be using them the most  and 2  All of these mini-documentation-languages all of them could easily be replaced with YAML

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Variable Names With Bloody Underscores  or even worse  CAPITALIZED VARIABLE NAMES WITH BLOODY UNDERSCORES  should be globally expunged    with prejudice  CamelCapsAreJustFine   Glolbal constants not withstanding   GOTO statements are for use by developers under the age of 11  Any language that does not support pointers is not worthy of the name   Net    Bloat The finest example of microsoft s efforts for web site development  Expressionless Web 2  is the finest example of slow bloated cr pw re ever written   try Web Studio instead   Response  OK well let me address the Underscore issue a little  From the C link you provided   -Global constants should be all caps with     separators   This I actually agree with because it is so BLOODY OBVIOUS  -Take for example NetworkABCKey  Notice how the C from ABC and K from key are confused  Some people don t mind this and others just hate it so you ll find different policies in different code so you never know what to call something    I fall into the former category  I choose names VERY carefully and if you cannot figure out in one glance that the K belongs to Key then english is probably not your first language    C Function Names   In a C   project there should be very few C functions  For C functions use the GNU convention of all lower case letters with     as the word delimiter      Justification    It makes C functions very different from any C   related names     Example  int    some bloody function              These  standards  and conventions are simply the arbitrary decisions handed down through time  I think that while they make a certain amount of logical sense  They clutter up code and make something that should be short and sweet to read  clumsy  long winded and cluttered   C has been adopted as the de-facto standard  not because it is friendly  but because it is pervasive  I can write 100 lines of C code in 20 with a syntactically friendly high level language   This makes the program flow easy to read  and as we all know  revisiting code after a year or more means following the breadcrumb trail all over the place    I do use underscores but for global variables only as they are few and far between and they stick out clearly  Other than that  a well thought out CamelCaps   function  variable name has yet to let me down

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Programming is neither art nor science   It is an engineering discipline   It s not art  programming requires creativity for sure   That doesn t make it art   Code is designed and written to work properly  not to be emotionally moving   Except for whitespace  changing code for aesthetic reasons breaks your code   While code can be beautiful  art is not the primary purpose   It s not science  science and technology are inseparable  but programming is in the technology category   Programming is not systematic study and observation  it is design and implementation   It s an engineering discipline  programmers design and build things   Good programmers design for function   They understand the trade-offs of different implementation options and choose the one that suits the problem they are solving     I m sure there are those out there who would love to parse words  stretching the definitions of art and science to include programming or constraining engineering to mechanical machines or hardware only   Check the dictionary   Also  The Art of Computer Programming  is a different usage of art that means a skill or craft  as in  the art of conversation    The product of programming is not art

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Source files are SO 20th century   Within the body of a function method  it makes sense to represent procedural logic as linear text  Even when the logic is not strictly linear  we have good programming constructs  loops  if statements  etc  that allow us to cleanly represent non-linear operations using linear text   But there is no reason that I should be required to divide my classes among distinct files or sort my functions methods fields properties etc in a particular order within those files  Why can t we just throw all those things within a big database file and let the IDE take care of sorting everything dynamically  If I want to sort my members by name then I ll click the member header on the members table  If I want to sort them by accessibility then I ll click the accessibility header  If I want to view my classes as an inheritence tree  then I ll click the button to do that   Perhaps classes and members could be viewed spatially  as if they were some sort of entities within a virtual world  If the programmer desired  the IDE could automatically position classes  amp  members that use each other near each other so that they re easy to find  Imaging being able to zoom in and out of this virtual world  Zoom all the way out and you can namespace galaxies with little class planets in them  Zoom in to a namespace and you can see class planets with method continents and islands and inner classes as orbitting moons  Zoom in to a method  and you see    the source code for that method   Basically  my point is that in modern languages it doesn t matter what file s  you put your classes in or in what order you define a class s members  so why are we still forced to use these archaic practices  Remember when Gmail came out and Google said  search  don t sort   Well  why can t the same philosophy be applied to programming languages

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Write your spec when you are finished coding   if at all   In many projects I have been involved in  a great deal of effort was spent at the outset writing a  spec  in Microsoft Word  This process culminated in a  sign off  meeting when the big shots bought in on the project  and after that meeting nobody ever looked at this document again  These documents are a complete waste of time and don t reflect how software is actually designed  This is not to say there are not other valuable artifacts of application design  They are usually contained on index cards  snapshots of whiteboards  cocktail napkins and other similar media that provide a kind of timeline for the app design  These are usually are the real specs of the app  If you are going to write a Word document   and I am not particularly saying you should  do it at the end of the project  At least it will accurately represent what has been done in the code and might help someone down the road like the the QA team or the next version developers

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I m probably gonna get roasted for this  but   Making invisible characters syntactically significant in python was a bad idea  It s distracting  causes lots of subtle bugs for novices and  in my opinion  wasn t really needed  About the only code I ve ever seen that didn t voluntarily follow some sort of decent formatting guide was from first-year CS students  And even if code doesn t follow  nice  standards  there are plenty of tools out there to coerce it into a more pleasing shape

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The code is the design

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Believe it or not  my belief that  in an OO language  most of the  business logic  code that operates on a class s data should be in the class itself is heresy on my team

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Before January 1st 1970  true and false were the other way around

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Usability problems are never the user s fault   I cannot count how often a problem turned up when some user did something that everybody in the team considered  just a stupid thing to do   Phrases like  why would somebody do that   or  why doesn t he just do XYZ  usually come up   Even though many are weary of hearing me say this  if a real-life user tried to do something that either did not work  caused something to go wrong or resulted in unexpected behaviour  then it can be anybody s fault  but not the user s   Please note that I do not mean people who intentionally misuse the software  I am referring to the presumable target group of the software

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Whenever you expose a mutable class to the outside world  you should provide events to make it possible to observe its mutation  The extra effort may also convince you to make it immutable after all

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A real programmer loves open-source like a soulmate and loves Microsoft as a dirty but satisfying prostitute

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Bad Programmers are Language-Agnostic  A really bad programmer can write bad code in almost any language

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Java Sucks  - yeah  I know that opinion is definitely not held by all     I have that opinion because the majority of Java applications I ve seen are memory hogs  run slowly  horrible user interface and so on   G-Man

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There is only one design pattern  encapsulation  For example    Factory method  you ve encapsulated object creation Strategy  you encapsulated different changeable algorithms Iterator  you encapsulated the way to sequentially access the elements in the collection

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Test Constantly  You have to write tests  and you have to write them FIRST  Writing tests changes the way you write your code  It makes you think about what you want it to actually do before you just jump in and write something that does everything except what you want it to do    It also gives you goals  Watching your tests go green gives you that little extra bump of confidence that you re getting something accomplished   It also gives you a basis for writing tests for your edge cases  Since you wrote the code against tests to begin with  you probably have some hooks in your code to test with   There is not excuse not to test your code  If you don t you re just lazy  I also think you should test first  as the benefits outweigh the extra time it takes to code this way

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It s fine if you don t know  But you re fired if you can t even google it   Internet is a tool  It s not making you stupider if you re learning from it

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Reuse of code is inversely proportional to its  reusability    Simply because  reusable  code is more complex  whereas quick hacks are easy to understand  so they get reused   Software failures should take down the system  so that it can be examined and fixed   Software attempting to handle failure conditions is often worse than crashing   ie  is it better to have a system reset after crashing  or should it be indefinitely hung because the failure handler has a bug

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That  at least during initial design   every Database Table  well  almost every one  should be clearly defined to contain some clearly understanable business entity or system-level domain abstraction  and that whether or not you use it as a a primary key and as Foreign Keys in other dependant tables  some column  attribute  or subset of the table attributes should be clearly defined to represent a unique key for that table  entity abstraction    This is the only way to ensure that the overall table structure represents a logically consistent representation of the complete system data structure  without overlap or misunbderstood flattening   I am a firm believeer in using non-meaningful surrogate keys for Pks and Fks and join functionality   for performance  ease of use  and other reasons   but I beleive the tendency in this direction has taken the database community too far away from the original Cobb principles  and we jhave lost much of the benefits  of database consistency  that natural keys provided     So why not use both

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A good developer needs to know more than just how to code

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Excessive HTML in PHP files  sometimes necessary  Excessive Javascript in PHP files  trigger the raptor attack  While I have a hard time figuring out all your switching between echoing and    lt   php  ing html  after all  php is just a processor for html   lines and lines of javascript added in make it a completely unmaintainable mess   People have to grasp this  They are two separate programming languages  Pick one to be your primary language  Then go on and find a quick  clean and easily maintainable way to make your primary include the secondary language   The reason why you jump between PHP  Javascript and HTML all the time is because you are bad at all three of them   Ok  maybe its not exactly controversial  I had the impression this was a general frustration venting topic

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I don t know if it s really controversial  but how about this  Method and function names are the best kind of commentary your code can have  if you find yourself writing a comment  turn the the piece of of code you re commenting into a function method   Doing this has the pleasant side-effect of forcing you to decompose your program well  avoids having comments that can quickly become out of sync with reality  gives you something you can grep the codebase for  and leaves your code with a fresh lemon odour

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Most developers don t have a clue  Yup    there you go  I ve said it  I find that from all the developers that I personally know    just a handful are actually good  Just a handful understand that code should be tested     that the Object Oriented approach to developing is actually there to help you  It frustrates me to no end that there are people who get the title of developer while in fact all they can do is copy and paste a bit of source code and then execute it   Anyway     I m glad initiatives like stackoverflow are being started  It s good for developers to wonder  Is there a better way  Am I doing it correctly  Perhaps I could use this technique to speed things up  etc      But nope     the majority of developers just learn a language that they are required by their job and stick with it until they themselves become old and grumpy developers that have no clue what s going on  All they ll get is a big paycheck since they are simply older than you   Ah well     life is unjust in the IT community and I ll be taking steps to ignore such people in the future  Hooray

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Comments are Lies   Comments don t run and are easily neglected  It s better to express the intention with clear  refactored code illustrated by unit tests   Unit tests written TDD of course      We don t write comments because they re verbose and obscure what s really going on in the code  If you feel the need to comment - find out what s not clear in the code and refactor write clearer tests until there s no need for the comment         something I learned from Extreme Programming  assumes of course that you have established team norms for cleaning the code

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This one is not exactly on programming  because html css are not programming languages   Tables are ok for layout  css and divs can t do everything  save yourself the hassle and use a simple table  then use css on top of it

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Best practices aren t

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I think its fine to use goto-statements  if you use them in a sane way  and a sane programming language   They can often make your code a lot easier to read and don t force you to use some twisted logic just to get one simple thing done

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Premature optimization is NOT the root of all evil  Lack of proper planning is the root of all evil      Remember the old naval saw      Proper Planning Prevents P ss Poor   Performance

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Never let best practices or pattern obsessesion slave you   These should be guidelines  not laws set in stone   And I really like the patterns  and the GoF book more or less says it that way too  stuff to browse through  providing a common jargon  Not a ball and chain gospel

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We do a lot of development here using a Model-View-Controller framework we built  I m often telling my developers that we need to violate the rules of the MVC design pattern to make the site run faster  This is a hard sell for developers  who are usually unwilling to sacrifice well-designed code for anything  But performance is our top priority in building web applications  so sometimes we have to make concessions in the framework   For example  the view layer should never talk directly to the database  right  But if you are generating large reports  the app will use a lot of memory to pass that data up through the model and controller layers  If you have a database that supports cursors  it can make the app a lot faster to hit the database directly from the view layer   Performance trumps development standards  that s my controversial view

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1-based arrays should always be used instead of 0-based arrays  0-based arrays are unnatural  unnecessary  and error prone     When I count apples or employees or widgets I start at one  not zero   I teach my kids the same thing   There is no such thing as a 0th apple or 0th employee or 0th widget   Using 1 as the base for an array is much more intuitive and less error-prone   Forget about plus-one-minus-one-hell  as we used to call it    0-based arrays are an unnatural construct invented by the computer science - they do not reflect reality and computer programs should reflect reality as much as possible

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When someone dismisses an entire programming language as  clumsy   it usually turns out he doesn t know how to use it

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Software development is an art

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HTML 5   JavaScript will be the most used UI programming platform of the future Flash Silverlight Java Applets etc  etc  are all going to die a silent death

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Uncommented code is the bane of humanity   I think that comments are necessary for code   They visually divide it up into logical parts  and provide an alternative representation when reading code   Documentation comments are the bare minimum  but using comments to split up longer functions helps when writing new code and allows quicker analysis when returning to existing code

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Upfront design - don t just start writing code because you re excited to write code  I ve seen SO many apps that are poorly designed because the developer was so excited to get coding that they just opened up a white page and started writing code  I understand that things change during the development lifecycle  However  it s difficult working with applications that have several different layouts and development methodologies from form to form  method to method   It s difficult to hit the target your application is to handle if you haven t clearly defined the task and how you plan to code it  Take some time  and not just 5 minutes  and make sure you ve laid out as much of it has you can before you start coding  This way you ll avoid a spaghetti mess that your replacement will have to support

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Source Control  Anything But SourceSafe  Also  Exclusive locking is evil   I once worked somewhere where they argued that exclusive locks meant that you were guaranteeing that people were not overwriting someone else s changes when you checked in  The problem was that in order to get any work done  if a file was locked devs would just change their local file to writable and merging  or overwriting  the source control with their version when they had the chance

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Software Development is a VERY small subset of Computer Science   People sometimes seem to think the two are synonymous  but in reality there are so many aspects to computer science that the average developer rarely  if ever  gets exposed to   Depending on one s career goals  I think there are a lot of CS graduates out there who would probably have been better off with some sort of Software Engineering education   I value education highly  have a BS in Computer science and am pursuing a MS in it part time  but I think that many people who obtain these degrees treat the degree as a means to an end and benefit very little   I know plenty of people who took the same Systems Software course I took  wrote the same assembler I wrote  and to this day see no value in what they did

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As most others here  I try to adhere to principles like DRY and not being a human compiler   Another strategy I want to push is  tell  don t ask   Instead of cluttering all objects with getters setters essentially making a sieve of them  I d like to tell them to do stuff   This seems to got straight against good enterprise practices with dumb entity objects and thicker service layer that does plenty of asking   Hmmm  thoughts

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1  You should not follow web standards - all the time   2  You don t need to comment your code    As long as it s understandable by a stranger

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Delphi is fun  Yes  I know it s outdated  but Delphi was and is a very fun tool to develop with

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Write your spec when you are finished coding   if at all   In many projects I have been involved in  a great deal of effort was spent at the outset writing a  spec  in Microsoft Word  This process culminated in a  sign off  meeting when the big shots bought in on the project  and after that meeting nobody ever looked at this document again  These documents are a complete waste of time and don t reflect how software is actually designed  This is not to say there are not other valuable artifacts of application design  They are usually contained on index cards  snapshots of whiteboards  cocktail napkins and other similar media that provide a kind of timeline for the app design  These are usually are the real specs of the app  If you are going to write a Word document   and I am not particularly saying you should  do it at the end of the project  At least it will accurately represent what has been done in the code and might help someone down the road like the the QA team or the next version developers

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Opinion  There should not be any compiler warnings  only errors  Or  formulated differently You should always compile your code with -Werror   Reason  Either the compiler thinks it is something which should be corrected  in case it should be an error  or it is not necessary to fix  in which case the compiler should just shut up

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I don t believe that any question related to optimization should be flooded with a chant of the misquoted  Premature optimization is the root of all evil s because code that is optimized into obfuscation is what makes coding fun

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Using regexs to parse HTML is  in many cases   fine  Every time someone posts a question on Stack Overflow asking how to achieve some HTML manuipulation with a regex  the first answer is  Regex is a insufficient tool to parse HTML so don t do it   If the questioner was trying to build a web browser  this would be a helpful answer  However  usually the questioner wants to do some thing like add a rel tag to all the links to a certain domain  usually in a case when certain assumptions can be made about the style of the incoming markup  something that is entiely reasonable to do with a regex

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The use of hungarian notation should be punished with death    That should be controversial enough

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Simplicity Vs Optimality  I believe its very difficult to write code that s both simple and optimal

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Development teams should be segregated more often by technological architectural layers instead of business function   I come from a general culture where developers own  everything from web page to stored procedure   So in order to implement a feature in the system application  they would prepare the database table schemas  write the stored procs  match the data access code  implement the business logic and web service methods  and the web page interfaces   And guess what  Everybody has their own way to doing things  Everyone struggles to learn the ASP NET AJAX and Telerik or Infragistic suites  Enterprise Library or other productivity and data layer and persistence frameworks  Aspect-oriented frameworks  logging and caching application blocks  DB2 or Oracle percularities  And guess what  Everybody takes heck of a long time to learn how to do things the proper way  Meaning  lots of mistakes in the meantime and plenty of resulting defects and performance bottlenecks  And heck of a longer time to fix them  Across each and every layer  Everybody has a hand in every Visual Studio project  Nobody is specialised to handle and optmise one problem technology domain  Too many chefs spoil the soup  All the chefs result in some radioactive goo   Developers may have cross-layer domain responsibilities  but they should not pretend that they can be masters of all disciplines  and should be limited to only a few  In my experience  when a project is not a small one and utilises lots of technologies  covering more business functions in a single layer is more productive  as well as encouraging more test code test that layer  than covering less business functions spanning the entire architectural stack  which motivates developers to test only via their UI and not test code

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Correct every defect when it s discovered  Not just  severity 1  defects  all defects   Establish a deployment mechanism that makes application updates immediately available to users  but allows them to choose when to accept these updates  Establish a direct communication mechanism with users that enables them to report defects  relate their experience with updates  and suggest improvements   With aggressive testing  many defects can be discovered during the iteration in which they are created  immediately correcting them reduces developer interrupts  a significant contributor to defect creation  Immediately correcting defects reported by users forges a constructive community  replacing product quality with product improvement as the main topic of conversation   Implementing user-suggested improvements that are consistent with your vision and strategy produces community of enthusiastic evangelists

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Managers know everything  It s been my experience that managers didn t get there by knowing code usually   No matter what you tell them it s too long  not right or too expensive   And another that follows on from the first   There s never time to do it right but there s always time to do it again  A good engineer friend once said that in anger to describe a situation where management halved his estimates  got a half-assed version out of him  then gave him twice as much time to rework it because it failed   It s a fairly regular thing in the commercial software world   And one that came to mind today while trying to configure a router with only a web interface   Web interfaces are for suckers  The CLI on the previous version of the firmware was oh so nice   This version has a web interface  which attempts to hide all of the complexity of networking from clueless IT droids  and can t even get VLANs correct

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MS Access  is a Real Development Tool and it can be used without shame by professional programmers  Just because a particular platform is a magnet for hacks and secretaries who think they are programmers shouldn t besmirch the platform itself   Every platform has its benefits and drawbacks   Programmers who bemoan certain platforms or tools or belittle them as  toys  are more likely to be far less knowledgable about their craft than their ego has convinced them they are  It is a definite sign of overconfidence for me to hear a programmer bash any environment that they have not personally used extensively enough to know well     Insert just about any maligned tool  VB  PHP  etc   here

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You must know how to type to be a programmer   It s controversial among people who don t know how to type  but who insist that they can two-finger hunt-and-peck as fast as any typist  or that they don t really need to spend that much time typing  or that Intellisense relieves the need to type     I ve never met anyone who does know how to type  but insists that it doesn t make a difference   See also   Programming s Dirtiest Little Secret

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Exceptions should only be used in truly exceptional cases  It seems like the use of exceptions has run rampant on the projects I ve worked on recently   Here s an example   We have filters that intercept web requests   The filter calls a screener  and the screener s job is to check to see if the request has certain input parameters and validate the parameters   You set the fields to check for  and the abstract class makes sure the parameters are not blank  then calls a screen   method implemented by your particular class to do more extended validation   public boolean processScreener HttpServletRequest req  HttpServletResponse resp  FilterConfig filterConfig  throws Exception                                         if   checkFieldExistence req                        return false                            return screen req resp filterConfig           That checkFieldExistance req  method never returns false   It returns true if none of the fields are missing  and throws an exception if a field is missing   I know that this is bad design  but part of the problem is that some architects here believe that you need to throw an exception every time you hit something unexpected   Also  I am aware that the signature of checkFieldExistance req  does throw an Exception  its just that almost all of our methods do - so it didn t occur to me that the method might throw an exception instead of returning false   Only until I dug through the code I noticed it

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Code layout does matter  Maybe specifics of brace position should remain purely religious arguments - but it doesn t mean that all layout styles are equal  or that there are no objective factors at all   The trouble is that the uber-rule for layout  namely   be consistent   sound as it is  is used as a crutch by many to never try to see if their default style can be improved on - and that  furthermore  it doesn t even matter   A few years ago I was studying Speed Reading techniques  and some of the things I learned about how the eye takes in information in  fixations   can most optimally scan pages  and the role of subconsciously picking up context  got me thinking about how this applied to code - and writing code with it in mind especially   It led me to a style that tended to be columnar in nature  with identifiers logically grouped and aligned where possible  in particular I became strict about having each method argument on its own line   However  rather than long columns of unchanging structure it s actually beneficial to vary the structure in blocks so that you end up with rectangular islands that the eye can take in in a single fixture - even if you don t consciously read every character   The net result is that  once you get used to it  which typically takes 1-3 days  it becomes pleasing to the eye  easier and faster to comprehend  and is less taxing on the eyes and brain because it s laid out in a way that makes it easier to take in   Almost without exception  everyone I have asked to try this style  including myself  initially said   ugh I hate it    but after a day or two said   I love it - I m finding it hard not to go back and rewrite all my old stuff this way     I ve been hoping to find the time to do more controlled experiments to collect together enough evidence to write a paper on  but as ever have been too busy with other things  However this seemed like a good opportunity to mention it to people interested in controversial techniques  -    Edit   I finally got around to blogging about this  after many years parked in the  meaning to  phase   Part one  Part two  Part three

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Assembler is not dead  In my job  copy protection systems  assembler programming is essential  I was working with many hll copy protection systems and only assembler gives you the real power to utilize all the possibilities hidden in the code  like code mutation  low level stuff    Also many code optimizations are possible only with an assembler programming  look at the sources of any video codecs  sources are written in assembler and optimized to use MMX SSE SSE2 opcodes whatever  many game engines uses assembler optimized routines  even Windows kernel has SSE optimized routines   NTDLL RtlMoveMemory   text 7C902CD8                 push    ebp  text 7C902CD9                 mov     ebp  esp  text 7C902CDB                 push    esi  text 7C902CDC                 push    edi  text 7C902CDD                 push    ebx  text 7C902CDE                 mov     esi   ebp 0Ch   text 7C902CE1                 mov     edi   ebp 8   text 7C902CE4                 mov     ecx   ebp 10h   text 7C902CE7                 mov     eax   esi   text 7C902CE9                 cld  text 7C902CEA                 mov     edx  ecx  text 7C902CEC                 and     ecx  3Fh  text 7C902CEF                 shr     edx  6  text 7C902CF2                 jz      loc 7C902EF2  text 7C902CF8                 dec     edx  text 7C902CF9                 jz      loc 7C902E77  text 7C902CFF                 prefetchnta byte ptr  esi-80h   text 7C902D03                 dec     edx  text 7C902D04                 jz      loc 7C902E03  text 7C902D0A                 prefetchnta byte ptr  esi-40h   text 7C902D0E                 dec     edx  text 7C902D0F                 jz      short loc 7C902D8F  text 7C902D11  text 7C902D11 loc 7C902D11                              CODE XREF   text 7C902D8Dj  text 7C902D11                 prefetchnta byte ptr  esi 100h   text 7C902D18                 mov     eax   esi   text 7C902D1A                 mov     ebx   esi 4   text 7C902D1D                 movnti   edi   eax  text 7C902D20                 movnti   edi 4   ebx  text 7C902D24                 mov     eax   esi 8   text 7C902D27                 mov     ebx   esi 0Ch   text 7C902D2A                 movnti   edi 8   eax  text 7C902D2E                 movnti   edi 0Ch   ebx  text 7C902D32                 mov     eax   esi 10h   text 7C902D35                 mov     ebx   esi 14h   text 7C902D38                 movnti   edi 10h   eax   So if you hear next time that assembler is dead  think about the last movie you have watched or the game you ve played  and its copy protection heh

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Primitive data types are premature optimization   There are languages that get by with just one data type  the scalar  and they do just fine   Other languages are not so fortunate   Developers just throw  int  and  double  in because they have to write in something   What s important is not how big the data types are  but what the data is used for   If you have a day of the month variable  it doesn t matter much if it s signed or unsigned  or whether it s char  short  int  long  long long  float  double  or long double   It does matter that it s a day of the month  and not a month  or day of week  or whatever   See Joel s column on making things that are wrong look wrong  Hungarian notation as originally proposed was a Good Idea   As used in practice  it s mostly useless  because it says the wrong thing

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Software is not an engineering discipline   We never should have let the computers escape from the math department

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Opinion  There should not be any compiler warnings  only errors  Or  formulated differently You should always compile your code with -Werror   Reason  Either the compiler thinks it is something which should be corrected  in case it should be an error  or it is not necessary to fix  in which case the compiler should just shut up

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Design Patterns are a symptom of Stone Age programming language design  They have their purpose  A lot of good software gets built with them  But the fact that there was a need to codify these  recipes  for psychological abstractions about how your code works should work speaks to a lack of programming languages expressive enough to handle this abstraction for us    The remedy  I think  lies in languages that allow you to embed more and more of the design into the code  by defining language constructs that might not exist or might not have general applicability but really really make sense in situations your code deals with incessantly  The Scheme people have known this for years  and there are things possible with Scheme macros that would make most monkeys-for-hire piss their pants

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Debuggers should be forbidden  This would force people to write code that is testable through unit tests  and in the end would lead to much better code quality   Remove Copy  amp  Paste from ALL programming IDEs  Copy  amp  pasted code is very bad  this option should be completely removed  Then the programmer will hopefully be too lazy to retype all the code so he makes a function and reuses the code   Whenever you use a Singleton  slap yourself  Singletons are almost never necessary  and are most of the time just a fancy name for a global variable

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It s okay to be Mort  Not everyone is a  rockstar  programmer  some of us do it because it s a good living  and we don t care about all the latest fads and trends  we just want to do our jobs

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I don t believe that any question related to optimization should be flooded with a chant of the misquoted  Premature optimization is the root of all evil s because code that is optimized into obfuscation is what makes coding fun

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Opinion  Unit tests don t need to be written up front  and sometimes not at all   Reasoning  Developers suck at testing their own code  We do  That s why we generally have test teams or QA groups   Most of the time the code we write is to intertwined with other code to be tested separately  so we end up jumping through patterned hoops to provide testability  Not that those patterns are bad  but they can sometimes add unnecessary complexity  all for the sake of unit testing         which often doesn t work anyway  To write a comprehensive unit test requires alot of time  Often more time than we re willing to give  And the more comprehensive the test  the more brittle it becomes if the interface of the thing it s testing changes  forcing a rewrite of a test that no longer compiles

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You don t have to program everything  I m getting tired that everything  but then everything needs to be stuffed in a program  like that is always faster  everything needs to be webbased  evrything needs to be done via a computer  Please  just use your pen and paper  it s faster and less maintenance

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Don t use stored procs in your database   The reasons they were originally good - security  abstraction  single connection - can all be done in your middle tier with ORMs that integrate lots of other advantages   This one is definitely controversial   Every time I bring it up  people tear me apart

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Bad Programmers are Language-Agnostic  A really bad programmer can write bad code in almost any language

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Design patterns are a waste of time when it comes to software design and development   Don t get me wrong  design patterns are useful but mainly as a communication vector  They can express complex ideas very concisely  factory  singleton  iterator     But they shouldn t serve as a development method  Too often developers architect their code using a flurry of design pattern-based classes where a more concise design would be better  both in term of readability and performance  All that with the illusion that individual classes could be reused outside their domain  If a class is not designed for reuse or isn t part of the interface  then it s an implementation detail   Design patterns should be used to put names on organizational features  not to dictate the way code must be written    It was supposed to be controversial  remember

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You don t have to program everything  I m getting tired that everything  but then everything needs to be stuffed in a program  like that is always faster  everything needs to be webbased  evrything needs to be done via a computer  Please  just use your pen and paper  it s faster and less maintenance

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Realizing sometimes good enough is good enough  is a major jump in your value as a programmer   Note that when I say  good enough   I mean  good enough   not it s some crap that happens to work   But then again  when you are under a time crunch   some crap that happens to work   may be considered  good enough

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Software development is just a job  Don t get me wrong  I enjoy software development a lot  I ve written a blog for the last few years on the subject  I ve spent enough time on here to have  5000 reputation points  And I work in a start-up doing typically 60 hour weeks for much less money than I could get as a contractor because the team is fantastic and the work is interesting   But in the grand scheme of things  it is just a job   It ranks in importance below many things such as family  my girlfriend  friends  happiness etc   and below other things I d rather be doing if I had an unlimited supply of cash such as riding motorbikes  sailing yachts  or snowboarding   I think sometimes a lot of developers forget that developing is just something that allows us to have the more important things in life  and to have them by doing something we enjoy  rather than being the end goal in itself

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Newer languages  and managed code do not make a bad programmer better

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Controversial to self  because some things are better be left unsaid  so you won t be painted by others as too egotist   However  here it is   If it is to be  it begins with me

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90 percent of programmers are pretty damn bad programmers  and virtually all of us have absolutely no tools to evaluate our current ability level  although we can generally look back and realize how bad we USED to suck   I wasn t going to post this because it pisses everyone off and I m not really trying for a negative score or anything  but   A  isn t that the point of the question  and   B  Most of the  Answers  in this thread prove this point  I heard a great analogy the other day   Programming abilities vary AT LEAST as much as sports abilities   How many of us could jump into a professional team and actually improve their chances

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Code    Design  I m no fan of sophisticated UML diagrams and endless code documentation  In a high level language  your code should be readable and understandable as is  Complex documentation and diagrams aren t really any more user friendly     Here s an article on the topic of Code as Design

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I ve been burned for broadcasting these opinions in public before  but here goes   Well-written code in dynamically typed languages follows static-typing conventions  Having used Python  PHP  Perl  and a few other dynamically typed languages  I find that well-written code in these languages follows static typing conventions  for example    Its considered bad style to re-use a variable with different types  for example  its bad style to take a list variable and assign an int  then assign the variable a bool in the same method   Well-written code in dynamically typed languages doesn t mix types  A type-error in a statically typed language is still a type-error in a dynamically typed language  Functions are generally designed to operate on a single datatype at a time  so that a function which accepts a parameter of type T can only sensibly be used with objects of type T or subclasses of T  Functions designed to operator on many different datatypes are written in a way that constrains parameters to a well-defined interface  In general terms  if two objects of types A and B perform a similar function  but aren t subclasses of one another  then they almost certainly implement the same interface    While dynamically typed languages certainly provide more than one way to crack a nut  most well-written  idiomatic code in these languages pays close attention to types just as rigorously as code written in statically typed languages   Dynamic typing does not reduce the amount of code programmers need to write  When I point out how peculiar it is that so many static-typing conventions cross over into dynamic typing world  I usually add  so why use dynamically typed languages to begin with     The immediate response is something along the lines of being able to write more terse  expressive code  because dynamic typing allows programmers to omit type annotations and explicitly defined interfaces  However  I think the most popular statically typed languages  such as C   Java  and Delphi  are bulky by design  not as a result of their type systems   I like to use languages with a real type system like OCaml  which is not only statically typed  but its type inference and structural typing allow programmers to omit most type annotations and interface definitions   The existence of the ML family of languages demostrates that we can enjoy the benefits of static typing with all the brevity of writing in a dynamically typed language  I actually use OCaml s REPL for ad hoc  throwaway scripts in exactly the same way everyone else uses Perl or Python as a scripting language

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I believe the use of try catch exception handling is worse than the use of simple return codes and associated common messaging structures to ferry useful error messages   Littering code with try catch blocks is not a solution   Just passing exceptions up the stack hoping whats above you will do the right thing or generate an informative error is not a solution   Thinking you have any chance of systematically verifying the proper exception handlers are avaliable to address anything that could go wrong in either transparent or opague objects is not realistic   Think also in terms of late bindings external libraries and unecessary dependancies between unrelated functions in a call stack as system evolves   Use of return codes are simple  can be easily systematically verified for coverage and if handled properly forces developers to generate useful error messages rather than the all-too-common stack dumps and obscure I O exceptions that are  exceptionally  meaningless to even the most clueful of end users   --  My final objection is the use of garbage collected languages   Don t get me wrong   I love them in some circumstances but in general for server MC systems they have no place in my view   GC is not infallable - even extremely well designed GC algorithms can hang on to objects too long or even forever based on non-obvious circular refrences in their dependancy graphs   Non-GC systems following a few simple patterns and use of memory accounting tools don t have this problem but do require more work in design and test upfront than GC environments   The tradeoff here is that memory leaks are extremely easy to spot during testing in Non-GC while finding GC related problem conditions is a much more difficult proposition   Memory is cheap but what happens when you leak expensive objects such as transaction handles  synchronization objects  socket connections   etc   In my environment the very thought that you can just sit back and let the language worry about this for you is unthinkable without significant fundental changes in software description

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Generated documentation is nearly always totally worthless   Or  as a corollary  Your API needs separate sets of documentation for maintainers and users   There are really two classes of people who need to understand your API  maintainers  who must understand the minutiae of your implementation to be effective at their job  and users  who need a high-level overview  examples  and thorough details about the effects of each method they have access to   I have never encountered generated documentation that succeeded in either area   Generally  when programmers write comments for tools to extract and make documentation out of  they aim for somewhere in the middle--just enough implementation detail to bore and confuse users yet not enough to significantly help maintainers  and not enough overview to be of any real assistance to users   As a maintainer  I d always rather have clean  clear comments  unmuddled by whatever strange markup your auto-doc tool requires  that tell me why you wrote that weird switch statement the way you did  or what bug this seemingly-redundant parameter check fixes  or whatever else I need to know to actually keep the code clean and bug-free as I work on it   I want this information right there in the code  adjacent to the code it s about  so I don t have to hunt down your website to find it in a state that lends itself to being read   As a user  I d always rather have a thorough  well-organized document  a set of web pages would be ideal  but I d settle for a well-structured text file  too  telling me how your API is architectured  what methods do what  and how I can accomplish what I want to use your API to do   I don t want to see internally what classes you wrote to allow me to do work  or files they re in for that matter   And I certainly don t want to have to download your source so I can figure out exactly what s going on behind the curtain   If your documentation were good enough  I wouldn t have to   That s how I see it  anyway

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Assembly is the best first programming language

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Software Architects Designers are Overrated  As a developer  I hate the idea of Software Architects  They are basically people that no longer code full time  read magazines and articles  and then tell you how to design software  Only people that actually write software full time for a living should be doing that  I don t care if you were the worlds best coder 5 years ago before you became an Architect  your opinion is useless to me   How s that for controversial   Edit  to clarify   I think most Software Architects make great Business Analysts  talking with customers  writing requirements  tests  etc   I simply think they have no place in designing software  high level or otherwise

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I don t believe that any question related to optimization should be flooded with a chant of the misquoted  Premature optimization is the root of all evil s because code that is optimized into obfuscation is what makes coding fun

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Believe it or not  my belief that  in an OO language  most of the  business logic  code that operates on a class s data should be in the class itself is heresy on my team

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Web applications suck  My Internet connection is veeery slow  My experience with almost every Web site that is not Google is  at least  frustrating  Why doesn t anybody write desktop apps anymore  Oh  I see  Nobody wants to be bothered with learning how operating systems work  At least  not Windows  The last time you had to handle WM PAINT  your head exploded  Creating a worker thread to perform a long task  I mean  doing it the Windows way  was totally beyond you  What the hell was a callback  Oh  my God     Garbage collection sucks  No  it actually doesn t  But it makes the programmers suck like nothing else  In college  the first language they taught us was Visual Basic  the original one   After that  there was another course where the teachers pretended they taught us C    But the damage was done  Nobody actually knew how to use this esoteric keyword delete did  After testing our programs  we either got invalid address exceptions or memory leaks  Sometimes  we got both  Among the 1  of my faculty who can actually program  only one who can manage his memory by himself  at least  he pretends  and he s writing this rant  The rest write their programs in VB NET  which  by definition  is a bad language     Dynamic typing suck  Unless you re using assembler  of course  that s the kind of dynamic typing that actually deserves praise   What I meant is the overhead imposed by dynamic  interpreted languages makes them suck  And don t come with that silly argument that different tools are good for different jobs  C is the right language for almost everything  it s fast  powerful and portable   and  when it isn t  it s not fast enough   there s always inline assembly     I might come up with more rants  but that will be later  not now

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SESE  Single Entry Single Exit  is not law  Example   public int foo        if  someCondition           return 0           return -1      vs   public int foo        int returnValue   -1      if  someCondition           returnValue   0           return returnValue      My team and I have found that abiding by this all the time is actually counter-productive in many cases

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1  You should not follow web standards - all the time   2  You don t need to comment your code    As long as it s understandable by a stranger

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Having a process that involves code being approved before it is merged onto the main line is a terrible idea   It breeds insecurity and laziness in developers  who  if they knew they could be screwing up dozens of people would be very careful about the changes they make  get lulled into a sense of not having to think about all the possible clients of the code they may be affecting   The person going over the code is less likely to have thought about it as much as the person writing it  so it can actually lead to poorer quality code being checked in    though  yes  it will probably follow all the style guidelines and be well commented

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Ternary operators absolutely suck   They are the epitome of lazy ass programing   user- gt isLoggedIn     user- gt update     user- gt askLogin      This is so easy to screw up  A little change in revision  2   user- gt isLoggedIn    amp  amp  user- gt isNotNew time      user- gt update     user- gt askLogin      Oh yeah  just one more  little change    user- gt isLoggedIn    amp  amp  user- gt isNotNew time      user- gt update          user- gt noCredentials     user- gt askSignup           user- gt askLogin      Oh crap  what about that OTHER case   user- gt isLoggedIn    amp  amp  user- gt isNotNew time     amp  amp   user- gt isBanned     user- gt update          user- gt noCredentials       user- gt isBanned     user- gt askSignup             user- gt askLogin      NO NO NO NO  Just save us the code change  Stop being freaking lazy   if  user- gt isLoggedIn          user- gt update     else       user- gt askLogin        Because doing it right the first time will save us all from having to convert your crap ternaries AGAIN and AGAIN   if  user- gt isLoggedIn    amp  amp  user- gt isNotNew time     amp  amp   user- gt isBanned          user- gt update     else       if  user- gt noCredentials       user- gt isBanned              user- gt askSignup          else           user- gt askLogin

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Programmers who spend all day answering questions on Stackoverflow are probably not doing the work they are being paid to do

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As most others here  I try to adhere to principles like DRY and not being a human compiler   Another strategy I want to push is  tell  don t ask   Instead of cluttering all objects with getters setters essentially making a sieve of them  I d like to tell them to do stuff   This seems to got straight against good enterprise practices with dumb entity objects and thicker service layer that does plenty of asking   Hmmm  thoughts

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Okay  I said I d give a bit more detail on my  sealed classes  opinion  I guess one way to show the kind of answer I m interested in is to give one myself     Opinion  Classes should be sealed by default in C   Reasoning   There s no doubt that inheritance is powerful  However  it has to be somewhat guided  If someone derives from a base class in a way which is completely unexpected  this can break the assumptions in the base implementation  Consider two methods in the base class  where one calls another - if these methods are both virtual  then that implementation detail has to be documented  otherwise someone could quite reasonably override the second method and expect a call to the first one to work  And of course  as soon as the implementation is documented  it can t be changed    so you lose flexibility   C  took a step in the right direction  relative to Java  by making methods sealed by default  However  I believe a further step - making classes sealed by default - would have been even better  In particular  it s easy to override methods  or not explicitly seal existing virtual methods which you don t override  so that you end up with unexpected behaviour  This wouldn t actually stop you from doing anything you can currently do - it s just changing a default  not changing the available options  It would be a  safer  default though  just like the default access in C  is always  the most private visibility available at that point    By making people explicitly state that they wanted people to be able to derive from their classes  we d be encouraging them to think about it a bit more  It would also help me with my laziness problem - while I know I should be sealing almost all of my classes  I rarely actually remember to do so     Counter-argument   I can see an argument that says that a class which has no virtual methods can be derived from relatively safely without the extra inflexibility and documentation usually required   I m not sure how to counter this one at the moment  other than to say that I believe the harm of accidentally-unsealed classes is greater than that of accidentally-sealed ones

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2 space indent   No discussion  It just has to be that way  -

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C  or C    should be the first programming language  The first language should NOT be the easy one  it should be one that sets up the student s mind and prepare it for serious computer science  C is perfect for that  it forces students to think about memory and all the low level stuff  and at the same time they can learn how to structure their code  it has functions    C   has the added advantage that it really sucks    thus the students will understand why people had to come up with Java and C

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Don t be shy  throw an exception  Exceptions are a perfectly valid way to signal failure  and are much clearer than any return-code system   Exceptional  has nothing to do with how often this can happen  and everything to do with what the class considers normal execution conditions  Throwing an exception when a division by zero occurs is just fine  regardless of how often the case can happen  If the problem is likely  guard your code so that the method doesn t get called with incorrect arguments

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Good Performance VS Elegant Design  They are not mutually exclusive but I can t stand over-designed class structures frameworks that completely have no clue about performance  I don t need to have a string of new This new That new Whatever      to create an object that will tell me it s 5 AM in the morning oh by the way  it s 217 days until Obama s birthday  and the weekend is 2 days away  I only wanted to know if the gym was open   Having balance between the 2 are crucial  The code needs to get nasty when you need to pump out all the processor do something intensive such as reading terabytes of data  Save the elegance for the places that consume the 10  of resources which is probably more than 90  of the code

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Open Source software costs more in the long run  For regular Line of Business companies  Open Source looks free but has hidden costs   When you take into account inconsistency of quality  variable usability and UI UX  difficulties of interoperability and standards  increased configuration  associated increased need for training and support  the Total Cost of Ownership for Open Source is much higher than commercial offerings   Tech-savvy programmer-types take the liberation of Open Source and run with it  they  get it  and can adopt it and customise it to suit their purposes  On the other hand  businesses that are primarily non-technical  but need software to run their offices  networks and websites are running the risk of a world of pain for themselves and heavy costs in terms of lost time  productivity and  eventually  support fees and or the cost of abandoning the experiement all together

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I fail to understand why people think that Java is absolutely the best  first  programming language to be taught in universities    For one  I believe that first programming language should be such that it highlights the need to learn control flow and variables  not objects and syntax  For another  I believe that people who have not had experience in debugging memory leaks in C   C   cannot fully appreciate what Java brings to the table   Also the natural progression should be from  how can I do this  to  how can I find the library which does that  and not the other way round

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QA can be done well  over the long haul  without exploring all forms of testing Lots of places seem to have an  quot approach quot   how  quot we do it quot   This seems to implicitly exclude other approaches  This is a serious problem over the long term  because the primary function of QA is to file bugs -and- get them fixed  You cannot do this well if you are not finding as many bugs as possible  When you exclude methodologies  for example  by being too black-box dependent  you start to ignore entire classes of discoverable coding errors  That means  by implication  you are making entire classes of coding errors unfixable  except when someone else stumbles on it  The underlying problem often seems to be management   staff  Managers with this problem seem to have narrow thinking about the computer science and or the value proposition of their team  They tend to create teams that reflect their approach  and a whitelist of testing methods  I am not saying you can or should do everything all the time  Lets face it  some test methods are simply going to be a waste of time for a given product  And some methodologies are more useful at certain levels of product maturity  But what I think is missing is the ability of testing organizations to challenge themselves to learn new things  and apply that to their overall performance  Here s a hypothetical conversation that would sum it up   Me  You tested that startup script for 10 years  and you managed to learn NOTHING about shell scripts and how they work   Tester  Yes  Me  Permissions  Tester  The installer does that Me  Platform  release-specific dependencies  Tester  We file bugs for that Me  Error handling  Tester  when errors happen to customer support sends us some info  Me  Okay    starts thinking about writing post in stackoverflow

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Java is not the best thing out there  Just because it comes with an  Enterprise  sticker does not make it good  Nor does it make it fast  Nor does it make it the answer to every question   Also  ROR is not all it is cracked up to be by the Blogsphere   While I am at it  OOP is not always good  In fact  I think it is usually bad

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Member variables should never be declared private  in java      If you declare something private  you prevent any future developer from deriving from your class and extending the functionality   Essentially  by writing  private  you are implying that you know more now about how your class can be used than any future developer might ever know      Whenever you write  private   you ought to write  protected  instead   Classes should never be declared final  in java   Similarly  if you declare a class as final  which prevents it from being extended -- prevents it from being used as a base class for inheritance   you are implying that you know more than any future programmer might know  about what is the right and proper way to use your class    This never a good idea   You don t know everything   Someone might come up with a perfectly suitable way to extend your class that you didn t think of   Java Beans are a terrible idea   The java bean convention -- declaring all members as private and then writing  get   and set   methods for every member -- forces programmers to write boilerplate  error-prone  tedious  and lengthy code  where no code is needed    Just make public members variables public   Trust in your ability to change it later  if you need to change the implementation  hint  99  of the time  you never will

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Whenever you expose a mutable class to the outside world  you should provide events to make it possible to observe its mutation  The extra effort may also convince you to make it immutable after all

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Web services absolutely suck  and are not the way of the future   They are ridiculously inefficient and they don t guarantee ordered delivery   Web services should NEVER be used within a system where both client and server are being written   They are mostly useful for micky mouse mash-up type applications   They should definitely not be used for any kind of connection-oriented communication   This stance has gotten myself and colleagues into some very heated discussions  since web services is such a buzzy topic   Any project that mandates the use of web services is doomed because it is clearly already having ridiculous demands pushed down from management

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Assembler is not dead  In my job  copy protection systems  assembler programming is essential  I was working with many hll copy protection systems and only assembler gives you the real power to utilize all the possibilities hidden in the code  like code mutation  low level stuff    Also many code optimizations are possible only with an assembler programming  look at the sources of any video codecs  sources are written in assembler and optimized to use MMX SSE SSE2 opcodes whatever  many game engines uses assembler optimized routines  even Windows kernel has SSE optimized routines   NTDLL RtlMoveMemory   text 7C902CD8                 push    ebp  text 7C902CD9                 mov     ebp  esp  text 7C902CDB                 push    esi  text 7C902CDC                 push    edi  text 7C902CDD                 push    ebx  text 7C902CDE                 mov     esi   ebp 0Ch   text 7C902CE1                 mov     edi   ebp 8   text 7C902CE4                 mov     ecx   ebp 10h   text 7C902CE7                 mov     eax   esi   text 7C902CE9                 cld  text 7C902CEA                 mov     edx  ecx  text 7C902CEC                 and     ecx  3Fh  text 7C902CEF                 shr     edx  6  text 7C902CF2                 jz      loc 7C902EF2  text 7C902CF8                 dec     edx  text 7C902CF9                 jz      loc 7C902E77  text 7C902CFF                 prefetchnta byte ptr  esi-80h   text 7C902D03                 dec     edx  text 7C902D04                 jz      loc 7C902E03  text 7C902D0A                 prefetchnta byte ptr  esi-40h   text 7C902D0E                 dec     edx  text 7C902D0F                 jz      short loc 7C902D8F  text 7C902D11  text 7C902D11 loc 7C902D11                              CODE XREF   text 7C902D8Dj  text 7C902D11                 prefetchnta byte ptr  esi 100h   text 7C902D18                 mov     eax   esi   text 7C902D1A                 mov     ebx   esi 4   text 7C902D1D                 movnti   edi   eax  text 7C902D20                 movnti   edi 4   ebx  text 7C902D24                 mov     eax   esi 8   text 7C902D27                 mov     ebx   esi 0Ch   text 7C902D2A                 movnti   edi 8   eax  text 7C902D2E                 movnti   edi 0Ch   ebx  text 7C902D32                 mov     eax   esi 10h   text 7C902D35                 mov     ebx   esi 14h   text 7C902D38                 movnti   edi 10h   eax   So if you hear next time that assembler is dead  think about the last movie you have watched or the game you ve played  and its copy protection heh

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Unnamed  tuples are evil   If you re using tuples as a container for several objects with unique meanings  use a class instead  If you re using them to hold several objects that should be accessible by index  use a list  If you re using them to return multiple values from a method  use Out parameters instead  this does require that your language supports pass-by-reference  If it s part of a code obfuscation strategy  keep using them    I see people using tuples just because they re too lazy to bother giving NAMES to their objects  Users of the API are then forced to access items in the tuple based on a meaningless index instead of a useful name

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You shouldn t settle on the first way you find to code something that  works    I really don t think this should be controversial  but it is   People see an example from elsewhere in the code  from online  or from some old  Teach yourself Advanced Power SQLJava BeansServer in 3 14159 minutes  book dated 1999  and they think they know something and they copy it into their code   They don t walk through the example to find out what each line does   They don t think about the design of their program and see if there might be a more organized or more natural way to do the same thing   They don t make any attempt at keeping their skill sets up to date to learn that they are using ideas and methods deprecated in the last year of the previous millenium   They don t seem to have the experience to learn that what they re copying has created specific horrific maintenance burdens for programmers for years and that they can be avoided with a little more thought   In fact  they don t even seem to recognize that there might be more than one way to do something   I come from the Perl world  where one of the slogans is  There s More Than One Way To Do It    TMTOWTDI   People who ve taken a cursory look at Perl have written it off as  write-only  or  unreadable   largely because they ve looked at crappy code written by people with the mindset I described above   Those people have given zero thought to design  maintainability  organization  reduction of duplication in code  coupling  cohesion  encapsulation  etc   They write crap   Those people exist programming in every language  and easy to learn languages with many ways to do things give them plenty of rope and guns to shoot and hang themselves with   Simultaneously   But if you hang around the Perl world for longer than a cursory look  and watch what the long-timers in the community are doing  you see a remarkable thing  the good Perl programmers spend some time seeking to find the best way to do something   When they re naming a new module  they ask around for suggestions and bounce their ideas off of people   They hand their code out to get looked at  critiqued  and modified   If they have to do something nasty  they encapsulate it in the smallest way possible in a module for use in a more organized way   Several implementations of the same idea might hang around for awhile  but they compete for mindshare and marketshare  and they compete by trying to do the best job  and a big part of that is by making themselves easily maintainable   Really good Perl programmers seem to think hard about what they are doing and looking for the best way to do things  rather than just grabbing the first idea that flits through their brain   Today I program primarily in the Java world   I ve seen some really good Java code  but I see a lot of junk as well  and I see more of the mindset I described at the beginning  people settle on the first ugly lump of code that seems to work  without understanding it  without thinking if there s a better way   You will see both mindsets in every language   I m not trying to impugn Java specifically    Actually I really like it in some ways     maybe that should be my real controversial opinion    But I m coming to believe that every programmer needs to spend a good couple of years with a TMTOWTDI-style language  because even though conventional wisdom has it that this leads to chaos and crappy code  it actually seems to produce people who understand that you need to think about the repercussions of what you are doing instead of trusting your language to have been designed to make you do the right thing with no effort   I do think you can err too far in the other direction  i e   perfectionism that totally ignores your true needs and goals  often the true needs and goals of your business  which is usually profitability    But I don t think anyone can be a truly great programmer without learning to invest some greater-than-average effort in thinking about finding the best  or at least one of the best  way to code what they are doing

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Pagination is never what the user wants  If you start having the discussion about where to do pagination  in the database  in the business logic  on the client  etc  then you are asking the wrong question  If your app is giving back more data than the user needs  figure out a way for the user to narrow down what they need based on real criteria  not arbitrary sized chunks  And if the user really does want all those results  then give them all the results  Who are you helping by giving back 20 at a time  The server  Is that more important than your user    EDIT  clarification  based on comments    As a real world example  let s look at this Stack Overflow question   Let s say I have a controversial programming opinion   Before I post  I d like to see if there is already an answer that addresses the same opinion  so I can upvote it   The only option I have is to click through every page of answers   I would prefer one of these options    Allow me to search through the answers  a way for me to narrow down what I need based on real criteria   Allow me to see all the answers so I can use my browser s  find  option  give me all the results     The same applies if I just want to find an answer I previously read  but can t find anymore   I don t know when it was posted or how many votes it has  so the sorting options don t help   And even if I did  I still have to play a guessing game to find the right page of results  The fact that the answers are paginated and I can directly click into one of a dozen pages is no help at all   -- bmb

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Non-development staff should not be allowed to manage development staff   Correction  Staff with zero development experience should not be allowed to manage development staff

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Write small methods   It seems that programmers love to write loooong methods where they do multiple different things     I think that a method should be created wherever you can name one

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Agile    sucks

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Design patterns are bad   Actually  design patterns aren t   You can write bad code  and bury it under a pile of patterns  Use singletons as global variables  and states as goto s  Whatever   A design pattern is a standard solution for a particular problem  but requires you to understand the problem first  If you don t  design patterns become a part of the problem for the next developer

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Programmers need to talk to customers  Some programmers believe that they don t need to be the ones talking to customers  It s a sure way for your company to write something absolutely brilliant which no one can work out what it s for or how it was intended to be used   You can t expect product managers and business analysts to make all the decisions  In fact  programmers should be making 990 out of the 1000  often small  decisions that go into creating a module or feature  otherwise the product would simply never ship  So make sure your decisions are informed  Understand your customers  work with them  watch them use your software   If you re going the write the best code  you want people to use it  Take an interest in your user base and learn from the  dumb idiots  who are out there  Don t be afraid  they ll actually love you for it

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QA should know the code  indirectly  better than development  QA gets paid to find things development didn t intend to happen  and they often do      Btw  I m a developer who just values good QA guys a whole bunch -- far to few of them    far to few

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C   is a good language  I practically got lynched in another question a week or two back for saying that C   wasn t a very nice language  So now I ll try saying the opposite      No  seriously  the point I tried to make then  and will try again now  is that C   has plenty of flaws  It s hard to deny that  It s so extremely complicated that learning it well is practically something you can dedicate your entire life to  It makes many common tasks needlessly hard  allows the user to plunge head-first into a sea of undefined behavior and unportable code  with no warnings given by the compiler   But it s not the useless  decrepit  obsolete  hated language that many people try to make it  It shouldn t be swept under the carpet and ignored  The world wouldn t be a better place without it  It has some unique strengths that  unfortunately  are hidden behind quirky syntax  legacy cruft and not least  bad C   teachers  But they re there   C   has many features that I desperately miss when programming in C  or other  modern  languages  There s a lot in it that C  and other modern languages could learn from   It s not blindly focused on OOP  but has instead explored and pioneered generic programming  It allows surprisingly expressive compile-time metaprogramming producing extremely efficient  robust and clean code  It took in lessons from functional programming almost a decade before C  got LINQ or lambda expressions   It allows you to catch a surprising number of errors at compile-time through static assertions and other metaprogramming tricks  which eases debugging vastly  and even beats unit tests in some ways   I d much rather catch an error at compile-time than afterwards  when I m running my tests    Deterministic destruction of variables allows RAII  an extremely powerful little trick that makes try finally blocks and C  s using blocks redundant   And while some people accuse it of being  design by committee   I d say yes  it is  and that s actually not a bad thing in this case  Look at Java s class library  How many classes have been deprecated again  How many should not be used  How many duplicate each others  functionality  How many are badly designed   C   s standard library is much smaller  but on the whole  it s remarkably well designed  and except for one or two minor warts  vector lt bool gt   for example   its design still holds up very well  When a feature is added to C   or its standard library  it is subjected to heavy scrutiny  Couldn t Java have benefited from the same   NET too  although it s younger and was somewhat better designed to begin with  is still accumulating a good handful of classes that are out of sync with reality  or were badly designed to begin with   C   has plenty of strengths that no other language can match  It s a good language

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I think that using regions in C  is totally acceptable to collapse your code while in VS  Too many people try to say it hides your code and makes it hard to find things  But if you use them properly they can be very helpful to identify sections of code

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Don t worry too much about what language to learn  use the industry heavy weights like c  or python  Languages like Ruby are fun in the bedroom  but don t do squat in workplace scenarios  Languages like c  and Java can handle small to the very large software projects  If anyone says otherwise  then your talking about a scripting language  Period   Before starting a project  consider how much support and code samples are available on the net  Again  choosing a language like Ruby which has very few code samples on the web compared to Java for example  will only cause you grief further down the road when your stuck on a problem   You can t post a message on a forum and expect an answer back while your boss is asking you how your coding is going  What are you going to say   I m waiting for someone to help me out on this forum   Learn one language and learn it good  Learning multiple languages may carry over skills and practices  but you ll only even be OK at all of them  Be good at one  There are entire books dedicated to Threading in Java which  when you think about it  is only one namespace out of over 100   Master one or be ok at lots

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Nobody Cares About Your Code  If you don t work on a government security clearance project and you re not in finance  odds are nobody cares what you re working on outside of your company customer base   No one s sniffing packets or trying to hack into your machine to read your source code   This doesn t mean we should be flippant about security  because there are certainly a number of people who just want to wreak general havoc and destroy your hard work  or access stored information your company may have such as credit card data or identity data in bulk   However  I think people are overly concerned about other people getting access to your source code and taking your ideas

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Assembly is the best first programming language

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Googling it  is okay   Yes  I know it offends some people out there that their years of intense memorization and or glorious stacks of programming books are starting to fall by the wayside to a resource that anyone can access within seconds  but you shouldn t hold that against people that use it   Too often I hear googling answers to problems the result of criticism  and it really is without sense   First of all  it must be conceded that everyone needs materials to reference   You don t know everything and you will need to look things up   Conceding that  does it really matter where you got the information   Does it matter if you looked it up in a book  looked it up on Google  or heard it from a talking frog that you hallucinated   No   A right answer is a right answer   What is important is that you understand the material  use it as the means to an end of a successful programming solution  and the client your employer is happy with the results    although if you are getting answers from hallucinatory talking frogs  you should probably get some help all the same

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The class library guidelines for implementing IDisposable are wrong   I don t share this too often  but I believe that the guidance for the default implementation for IDisposable is completely wrong   My issue isn t with the overload of Dispose and then removing the item from finalization  but rather  I despise how there is a call to release the managed resources in the finalizer   I personally believe that an exception should be thrown  and yes  with all the nastiness that comes from throwing it on the finalizer thread    The reasoning behind it is that if you are a client or server of IDisposable  there is an understanding that you can t simply leave the object lying around to be finalized   If you do  this is a design implementation flaw  depending on how it is left lying around  and or how it is exposed   as you are not aware of the lifetime of instances that you should be aware of   I think that this type of bug error is on the level of race conditions synchronization to resources   Unfortunately  with calling the overload of Dispose  that error is never materialized   Edit   I ve written a blog post on the subject if anyone is interested   http   www caspershouse com post A-Better-Implementation-Pattern-for-IDisposable aspx

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Stay away from Celko      http   www dbdebunk com page page 857309 htm  I think it makes a lot more sense to use surrogate primary keys then  natural  primary keys      ocdecio  Fabian Pascal gives  in chapter 3 of his book Practical issues in database management  cited in point 3 at the page that you link  as one of the criteria for choosing a key that of stability  it always exists and doesn t change   When a natural key does not possesses such property  than a surrogate key must be used  for evident reasons  to which you hint in comments   You don t know what he wrote and you have not bothered to check  otherwise you could discover that you actually agree with him  Nothing controversial there  he was saying  don t be dogmatic  adapt general guidelines to circumstances  and  above all  think  use your brain instead of a dogmatic cookbook words-of-guru approach

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Reflection has no place in production code  Reflection breaks static analysis including refactoring tools and static type checking  Reflection also breaks the normal assumptions developers have about code  For example  adding a method to a class  that doesn t shadow some other method in the class  should never have any effect  but when reflection is being used  some other piece of code may  discover  the new method and decide to call it  Actually determining if such code exists is intractable   I do think it s fine to use reflection and tests and in code generators   Yes  this does mean that I try to avoid frameworks that use reflection   it s too bad that Java lacks proper compile-time meta-programming support

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Opinion  That frameworks and third part components should be only used as a last resort   I often see programmers immediately pick a framework to accomplish a task without learning the underlying approach it takes to work   Something will inevitably break  or we ll find a limition we didn t account for and we ll be immediately stuck and have to rethink major part of a system   Frameworks are fine to use as long it is carefully thought out

[language-agnostic] What's your most controversial programming opinion?

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