Avoid these bad coding habits.

Hello Everyone!

When it comes to coding, most people think it is something mystical that only geeks can understand. Believe me, it is not like that my friend. Anyone can code with a fair amount of practice.

There is nothing mystical about it.

Coding is a skill like any other. Like language learning, there’s grammar and vocabulary to acquire. Like math, there are processes to work through specific types of problems. Like all kinds of craftsmanship and art-making, there are techniques and tools and best practices that people have developed over time, specialized to different tasks, that you’re free to use or modify or discard.

Here we are about to see a few bad coding habits that you must avoid.

Avoid these bad coding practices:

1. Saying “I’ll fix it later”.

The habit of postponing code fixes is not merely a problem of priorities. Organizing your issue tracker might generate some progress, but you also need to have a way of tracking smaller issues that come up. Adding “TODO” comments is a quick way of making sure you don’t miss anything.

2. Insisting on a one-liner solution

Being obsessive about writing efficient, elegant pieces of code is a common trait of programmers. It’s like solving a puzzle—you find a combination of functions and regular expressions that turn 20 code lines into 2 or 3. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always result in readable code, and that’s generally the far more important outcome. Make your code accessible first, then clever.

3. Difficulty seeing through recursion

The idea of recursion is easy enough to understand, but programmers often have problems imagining the result of a recursive operation in their minds, or how a complex result can be computed with a simple function. This makes it harder to design a recursive function because you have trouble picturing “where you are” when you come to writing the test for the base condition or the parameters for the recursive call.

4. your code is a mess

Symptoms

Doesn’t follow a consistent naming convention.
Doesn’t use indentation, or uses inconsistent indentation.
Doesn’t make use of whitespace elsewhere, such as between methods (or expressions).
Large chunks of code are left commented-out.

Programmers in a hurry commit all these crimes and come back to clean it up later, but a bad programmer is just sloppy. Sometimes it helps to use an IDE that can fix indentation and whitespace with a shortcut key, but there are programmers who can even bludgeon Visual Studio’s insistence on proper indentation by messing around with the code too much.

5.Reinventing the wheel all the time

Don’t write code you don’t need to. Perhaps someone else has spent a good deal of time on your problem already, and he or she might have a well-tested solution that you can reuse. Save yourself some trouble.

Conclusion.

As the old saying goes, “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.” The same is true for bad code. If it looks like bad code and smells like bad code, it’s probably bad code. The infallible developer does not exist. The almighty developers that came before may have made a mistake, and you will too. It is how coding works.

So, this is it for this article. We will surely talk about good coding habits and practices in upcoming articles.

Thank You.