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

Just wanted to add my 2 cents... comments in your code -- and your code itself, generally -- should say what your code does, now how it does it. Once you have the concept of 'client' code, which is code that calls other code (simplest example is code that calls a method), you should always be most worried about making your code comprehensible from the "client's" perspective. As your code grows, you'll see that this is... uh, good.

A lot of the other stuff about good code is about the mental leaps that you'll make (definitely, if you pay attention)... 99% of them have to do with doing a bit more work now to spare you a ton of work later, and reusability. And also with doing things right: I almost always want to run the other way rather than using regular expressions, but every time I get into them, I see why everybody uses them in every single language I work in (they're abstruse, but work and probably couldn't be better).

Regarding whether to look at books, I would say definitely not in my experience. Look at APIs and frameworks and code conventions and other people's code and use your own instincts, and try to understand why stuff is the way it is and what the implications of things are. The thing that code in books almost never does is plan for the unplanned, which is what error checking is all about. This only pays off when somebody sends you an email and says, "I got error 321" instead of "hey, the app is broke, yo."

Good code is written with the future in mind, both from the programmer's perspective and the user's perspective.

Answer 2

This is answered pretty well in Fowler's book, "Refactoring", It's the absence of all the "smells" he describes throughout the book.

Answer 3

Ironically the better the programmer the less indispensable he/she becomes because the code produced is better maintainable by anyone (as stated by general consent by Eran Galperin).

My experience tells the opposite is also true. The worse the programmer the more difficult to maintain his/her code is, so more indispensable he/she becomes, since no other soul can understand the riddles produced.

Answer 4

This seems to be (should be) a FAQ. There is an ACM article about beautiful code recently. There seems to be a lot of emphasis on easy to read/understand. I'd qualifier this with "easy to read/understand by domain experts". Really good programmers tend to use the best algorithms (instead of naive easy to understand O(n^2) algorithms) for any given problems, which could be hard to follow, if you're not familiar with the algorithm, even if the good programmer gives a reference to the algorithm.

Nobody is perfect including good programmers but their code tend to strive for:

1. Correctness and efficiency with proven algorithms (instead of naive and adhoc hacks)
2. Clarity (comment for intent with reference to non-trivial algorithms)
3. Completeness to cover the basics (coding convention, versioning, documentation, unit tests etc.)
4. Succinctness (DRY)
5. Robustness (resilient to arbitrary input and disruption of change requests)

Answer 5

Code is a reflection of a programmer's skills and mindset. Good programmers always have an eye on the future - how the code will function when requirements or circumstances are not exactly what they are today. How scalabale it will be? How convenient it will be when I am not the one maintaining this code? How reusable the code will be, so that someone else doing similar stuff can reuse the code and not write it again. What when someone else is trying to understand the code that I have written.

When a programmer has that mindset, all the other stuff falls in place nicely.

Note: A code base is worked on by many programmers over time and typically there is not a specific designation of code base to a programmer. Hence good code is a reflection of all the company's standards and quality of their workforce.

Answer 6

• Easy to read
• easy to write
• easy to maintain

everything else is filigree