Han-Wen Nienhuys <hanw...@gmail.com> writes: > On Sat, Feb 16, 2013 at 3:46 PM, David Kastrup <d...@gnu.org> wrote: > >> I was talking about "reasonable documenting and coding practice". >> That does not involve how to structure things. As I said, we are >> talking about post-1960s Pascal coding, and he tried his best to >> still present things in a structured way, in well-documented >> meaningful chunks. >> >> Nowadays we have much more modular programming languages, and we make >> a mess of it. I consider doing good work with bad tools a better >> example than doing bad work with good tools. > > What is your practical advice for coding practices, then?
Recently, a man was fired in the U.S. after system administrators found an open VNC connection from China into their network. The initial suspicion of a hacker attack was wrong. It turned out that the programmer was surfing the Internet and Paypal all day. His work was done via VNC connection by a Chinese programmer getting about a third of his pay. The rig apparently had been going on for a considerable amount of time (like years), with the code from the programmer getting consistent high marks from colleagues. I am not surprised. I would suggest to code like that Chinese programmer, so that any questions regarding the code will get a plausible "Let's see, what was I thinking here? Wait, I remember this was a bit more complex, be back in a minute." reply, with your "partner" actually being able to be back in a minute. Code in a manner that makes it possible for others to pretend they have written it. That means a clear layout and concise documentation. If you write code that others can get into fast enough to pass them off as their own plausibly, you are doing a good job. That means using patterns as expected, language paradigms as expected, and documenting what might be unexpected. It means being obvious and not clever. It means picking suitable tools for the job, taking more time for finding the best way to do things than just doing whatever comes into your mind first, and not coding at the limit of your capacity. -- David Kastrup _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list lilypond-devel@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
