Bad programmers I've dealt with tend to share certain traits:
- Their code is large, messy and bug-laden
- They have very superficial knowledge of their problem domain and their tools
- Their code has a lot of copy and paste, and they have very little interest in techniques that reduce it
- They fail to account for edge cases while inefficiently dealing with the general case
- They're always rushing around putting out fires, trying to look like heroes battling vast problems against impossible odds
- They never have time to comment their code or break it into smaller pieces
- Empirical evidence plays no role in their decisions
It would be hard to self-test, but some clues would be: do you think you're the best programmer in the world? Do you find code with a lot of functions messier and harder to understand than code with only a few large functions? Do you routinely copy code from one place to another and make a few small changes to it? Do your programs tend to be a few huge files or lots of small files? When you're asked to make a change, do you usually have to touch most of the code or just a small chunk of it? If you say 'yes' to most of these, you're probably bad. If not, you're probably alright. :)
Another clue is to go read the CodeSOD articles at The Daily WTF[1]. If you find them funny or horrifying, you're probably alright. If you don't understand what makes them terrible, you're probably bad.
- Their code is large, messy and bug-laden
- They have very superficial knowledge of their problem domain and their tools
- Their code has a lot of copy and paste, and they have very little interest in techniques that reduce it
- They fail to account for edge cases while inefficiently dealing with the general case
- They're always rushing around putting out fires, trying to look like heroes battling vast problems against impossible odds
- They never have time to comment their code or break it into smaller pieces
- Empirical evidence plays no role in their decisions
It would be hard to self-test, but some clues would be: do you think you're the best programmer in the world? Do you find code with a lot of functions messier and harder to understand than code with only a few large functions? Do you routinely copy code from one place to another and make a few small changes to it? Do your programs tend to be a few huge files or lots of small files? When you're asked to make a change, do you usually have to touch most of the code or just a small chunk of it? If you say 'yes' to most of these, you're probably bad. If not, you're probably alright. :)
Another clue is to go read the CodeSOD articles at The Daily WTF[1]. If you find them funny or horrifying, you're probably alright. If you don't understand what makes them terrible, you're probably bad.
[1] http://thedailywtf.com/