What does a good programmer's code look like?

Question

I am a hobbyist programmer (started with VBA to make excel quicker) and have been working with VB.NET / C#.NET and am trying to learn ADO.NET.

A facet of programming that has always frustrated me is what does 'good' look like? I am not a professional so have little to compare against. What makes a better programmer? Is it:

• They have a better understanding of all the objects / classes / methods in a given language?
• Their programs are more efficient?
• The design of their programs are much better in terms of better documentation, good choice of names for functions etc.?

Put another way, if I were to look at the code of a professional programmer, what is the first thing that I would notice about their code relative to mine? For example, I read books like 'Professional ASP.NET' by Wrox press. Are the code examples in that book 'world class'? Is that the pinnacle? Would any top-gun programmer look at that code and think it was good code?

Answer 1

Rather then repeat everyone else's great suggestions, I will instead suggest that you read the book Code Complete by Steve McConnell

Essentially it is a book packed full of programming best practices for both functionality and style.

Answer 2

I haven't seen 'Professional ASP.NET', but I'd be surprised if it's better than OK. See this question for some books with really good code. (It varies, of course, but the accepted answer there is hard to beat.)

Answer 3

Code is poetry.

Start from this point of logic and you can derive many of the desirable qualities of code. Most importantly, observe that code is read far more than it is written, hence write code for the reader. Rewrite, rename, edit, and refactor for the reader.

A follow on corollary:

The reader will be you at time n from the code creation date. The payoff of writing code for the reader is a monotonically increasing function of n. A reader looking at your code for the first time is indicated by n == infinity.

In other words, the larger the gap of time from when you wrote the code to when you revisit the code, the more you will appreciate your efforts to write for the reader. Also, anyone you hand your code off to will gain great benefit from code written with the reader as the foremost consideration.

A second corollary:

Code written without consideration for the reader can be unnecessarily difficult to understand or use. When the consideration for the reader drops below a certain threshold, the reader derives less value from the code than the value gained by rewriting the code. When this occurs the previous code is thrown away and, tragically, much work is repeated during the rewrite.

A third corollary:

Corollary two has been known to repeat itself multiple times in a vicious cycle of poorly documented code followed by forced rewrites.

Answer 4

Succinctly put, a good programmer's code can be read and understood.

In my opinion, a good programmer's code is language-agnostic; well-written code can be read and understood in a short amount of time with minimal thinking, regardless of the programming language used. Whether the code is in Java, Python, C++ or Haskell, well-written code is understandable by people who don't even program in that particular language.

Some characteristics of code that is easy to read are, methods that are well-named, absence of "tricks" and convoluted "optimization", classes are well-designed, to name a few. As others have mentioned, coding style is consistent, succinct and straight-forward.

For example, the other day, I was taking a look at the code for TinyMCE to answer one of the questions on Stack Overflow. It is written in JavaScript, a language that I've hardly used. Yet, because of the coding style and the comments that are included, along with the structuring of the code itself, it was fairly understandable, and I was able to navigate through the code in a few minutes.

One book that was quite an eye-opener for me in the regard of reading good programmer's code is Beautiful Code. It has many articles written by authors of various programming projects in various programming languages. Yet, when I read it, I could understand what the author was writing in his code despite the fact that I've never even programmed in that particular language.

Perhaps what we should keep in mind is that programming is also about communication, not only to the computer but to people, so good programmer's code is almost like a well-written book, which can communicate to the reader about the ideas it wants to convey.

Answer 5

Having been programming for nearly 10 years now myself and having worked with others I can say without bias that there is no difference between a good programmer and an average programmers code

All programmers at a competent level:

• Comment Correctly
• Structure Efficiently
• Document Cleanly

I once overheard a co-worker say "I've always been very logical and rational minded. I think that's why I enjoy developing"

That in my opinion, is the mind of an average programmer. One who sees the world in terms of rules and logic and ultimately obeys those rules when designing and writing a program.

The expert programmer, understands the rules, but also their context. This ultimately leads to them coming up with new ideas and implementations, the mark of an expert programmer. Programming is ultimately an art form.

Answer 6

Great code to me is something that is simple to grasp yet sophisticated. The things that make you go, "wow, of course, why didn't I think of it that way?". Really good code is not hard to understand, it simply solves the problem at hand in a straight-forward way (or a recursive way, if that is even simpler).