10 more bad programming habits we secretly love
We all know the thrill of bending the rules, or even breaking them. Maybe it’s going 56 in a 55-MPH zone, or letting the parking meter expire. Maybe it’s dividing two numbers without testing to see if the denominator is zero.
Programmers have a weird relationship with rules. On one hand, code is just a huge pile of rules—rules that are endlessly applied by dutiful silicon gates without fear or favor, almost always without alpha particle-induced error. We want the transistors to follow these rules perfectly.
But there’s another layer of rules that aren’t so sacrosanct. Unlike the instructions we feed to machines, the rules we make for ourselves are highly bendable. Some are simply stylistic, others are designed to bring consistency to our unruly piles of code. This set of rules applies to what we do, not how the machines respond.