What Today's Coders Don't Know and Why It Matters

jfruhlinger writes "Today's programmers have much more advanced languages and more forgiving hardware to play with — but it seems many have forgotten some of the lessons their predecessors picked up in a more resource-constrained era. Newer programmers are less adept at identifying hardware constraints and errors, developing thorough specifications before coding, and low-level skills like programming in assembly language. You never know when a seemingly obsolete skill will come in handy. For instance, Web developers who cut their teeth in the days of 14.4 Kbps modems have a leg up in writing apps for laggy wireless networks."

Comments

Re:tl;dr

[BitZtream]

And a too descriptive variable name also means you can't repurpose a variable, for example price_per_unit *= number_of_units won't work, cause then the variable will be lying.
cost *= units, on the other hand, works fine.

Repurposing a variable like that is very bad form, it generally makes your code far more complex for the next guy who has to read it. The compiler will deal with the fact that you used two variables instead of one just fine, it'll optimize it down to the same code (well, GCC might not, but any respectable compiler will)