Are You Proud of Your Code?

An anonymous reader writes "I am downright embarrassed by the quality of my code. It is buggy, slow, fragile, and a nightmare to maintain. Do you feel the same way? If so, then what is holding you back from realizing your full potential? More importantly, what if anything are you planning to do about it? I enjoy programming and have from a young age (cut my teeth on BASIC on an Apple IIe). I have worked for companies large and small in a variety of languages and platforms. Sadly the one constant in my career is that I am assigned to projects that drift, seemingly aimlessly, from inception to a point where the client runs out of funding. Have any developers here successfully lobbied their company to stop or cut back on 'cowboy coding' and adopt best practices? Has anyone convinced their superiors that the customer isn't always right and saying no once in awhile is the best course of action?"

Comments

Re:Something to note about other people's opinions

[Anonymous Coward]

I had this problem with a guy that was complaining that my code was full of GOTO statements, used all global variables, and didn't have any comments or subroutines. Bah, it worked so why should he bitch about it?

Lost out

[gaou]

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
Edsger Dijkstra

Sorry mate, there is no hope :)

Re:Something to note about other people's opinions

[CmdrGravy]

No wonder, that's a really old fashioned way of doing things. You need to get with the times and functional programming. Personally I do all my programming in functions, often I just need 1 or 2 big functions for a program if I make sure the functions all behave entirely differently depending on the values of the 30 or so parameters I pass to them. It's very efficient and yet still people moan !

CalcCallWaitingTime StripIllegalCharacters CreateInterfaceToACD DrawCalendarOutline may well be quite a long title ( often it's easier to acronymise them before I hand the code over ) but it's amazing the number of loops you can reuse if you have enough switches.

Re:Something to note about other people's opinions

[LiquidCoooled]

I often find passing the function name itself as a parameter helps with loop re-use.
That way you only need to create a single do loop and allow your cx(...) sub (result passed back in the 14th argument unless the 3rd is "E" or above in which case its pushed onto the reference you passed as arg[19 + val(arg4)].

The last guy who tried to use the code was so awestruck with my genius he passed out!

Yes

[Average_Joe_Sixpack]

I often use "Programmer: Alan Smithee" in the comment header