Have pride in your code
bq. Code that is not owned encourages poor coding practices that lead to totally un-maintainable code and ultimately utter anarchy. This isn’t anything specific to our industry, whatever craft you do, it is extremely important to take pride in your work. It is important to let people know it is your piece of work. It is not about promoting finger pointing or blame culture. It is about having pride in your work. It is also a mark of responsibility. It is about taking ownership and having the motivation to produce better results.
August 5th, 2003 at 9:36 am
Yes.
Maintaining thousands of lines of schizophrenically indented code from people who don’t even defend this indentation is depressing. If they argued the case, maybe I’d be convinced, but if they don’t care, it’s that bit harder to muster your enthusiasm.
August 5th, 2003 at 10:54 am
There was a lad called —-, who we both know well, who used to call me over to help debug his code. And his code would run all the way down the side of the screen, no indentation whatsoever! Drove me up the wall.
You know who you are.
August 7th, 2003 at 4:10 pm
In one sense, JB’s ability to just look at the code, with the formatting being immaterial, is awe-inspiring. I mean, we all should be sufficiently comfortable with our language of choice to be able to look at it, and not the whitespace and comments.
On the other hand, there’s no shame in say, getting a headache from reading the “creatively spelled” chapters of Feersum Endjinn; standardisation in spelling has its advantages.