Bad Programming Habits We Secretly Love (infoworld.com)

snydeq writes: Breaking the rules can bring a little thrill — and sometimes produce better, more efficient code. From the article: 'The rules are more often guidelines or stylistic suggestions, not hard-and-fast rules that must be obeyed or code death will follow. Sure, your code might be ridiculed, possibly even publicly, but the fact that you're bucking conventions adds a little bit of the thrill to subverting, even inadvertently, what amounts more often than not to the social mores of pleasant code. To make matters more complex, sometimes it's better to break the rules. (Shhhh!) The code comes out cleaner. It may even be faster and simpler.' What bad programming habits can't you (or won't you) break?

Comments

No "new"

[alvieboy]

If you're using Java, do not use "new" at any time. It may cause the garbage collector to stop your application later to free whatever you did not tell you wish to not use any more. So, no "new" at all , and no objects (they really suck), and nothing fancy as memory allocation (why do you want to steal memory from other processes?)

That will also make your application smaller and easy to understand. Your application will just happily exit, thus not putting any pressure on the VM.

Doing no work at all is better that doing it wrong.