Ask Slashdot: What Are Some Bad Programming Ideas That Work? (infoworld.com)

snydeq writes: Cheaper, faster, better side effects -- sometimes a bad idea in programming is better than just good enough, writes InfoWorld's Peter Wayner: "Some ideas, schemes, or architectures may truly stink, but they may also be the best choice for your project. They may be cheaper or faster, or maybe it's too hard to do things the right way. In other words, sometimes bad is simply good enough. There are also occasions when a bad idea comes with a silver lining. It may not be the best approach, but it has such good side-effects that it's the way to go. If we're stuck going down a suboptimal path to programming hell, we might as well make the most of whatever gems may be buried there." What bad programming ideas have you found useful enough to make work in your projects? Don't be shy or ashamed, we all want to hear your responses!

Comments

Re:Shying away from OOP(s)

[quietwalker]

I had to work under a lead who had "Design Pattern Prejudice". Every class had to be named based on the pattern it took after, and everything had to come from factory factories that worked off interfaces to abstract parents at every step, everything had to be immutable, and in any given review, he'd point to a section of code and ask what design pattern this followed. If you couldn't specify one, he'd fail the review, and if you could, he'd want you to rewrite it to use at least 2 or 3 more patterns.

Granted, he'd spend a whole week writing code, fail to complete any of his issues, and check in around 40 new classes & interfaces, but not one of them had any business logic in them at all, and then demand everyone refactor their code to use his new architecture.

We only got things done when we started ignoring him.

Re:Shying away from OOP(s)

[Dutch Gun]

It could definitely be an anti-pattern if used incorrectly, but honestly, I've been programming in C++ for about twenty years, and do you know how many times I've seen co-workers abuse operator overloading? Precisely ZERO. Seriously... never seen it. Apparently, I work with people who weren't stupid to flagrantly abuse operator overloading for no good reason, even among those who didn't exactly produce the cleanest or more elegant code.

On the other hand, this is the type of code I typically work with:

Vector3 posDelta = position - lastPosition;

Or this:

Matrix m = m1 * m2;

Overloading operators is best done in an absolutely literal sense. For instance, if you're doing matrix multiplication or subtracting two positions to get a delta value, the intent and what's happening in the code is 100% clear to everyone.

I chuckle sometimes at how C programmers believe that there's some evil overloaded operator lurking behind every multiply or addition. Uh, yeah... you can also obfuscate the crap out of your C programs too (pretty sure I've heard about some sort of contest too *cough*), but you just don't do that.