Re: Bad Practice

I fully understand what you said, but I think your teammates’ thinking is also valid. If your old code still works, it still works, although it might have a “bad” style as you said. I would say, for any new development, you should go with the “good” style, there is no doubt about that.

But for existing code in your repository, you don’t just go back, and modify them because their style is “bad” (I rather say it is “old”, it might be “good” at the time it was developed.) To keep your system stable is also a “good” practice.

Any way, discuss with your teammates more, but don’t bluntly call their opinion as bad practice. Bad practice is a very serious accusation against programmers, and some people really care. The purpose of pushing your idea is to make others accept it, you have to do it skillfully, if you push too hard, chance is that you will achieve nothing but to hurt the synergy among teammates…

I know you can make it, good luck ;-)

Comment on Re: Bad Practice

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Re: Re: Bad Practice by Nkuvu (Priest) on Feb 27, 2003 at 19:17 UTC
The code may work as is, but as has already been pointed out in the thread there are some potential security issues as well. I'd think that alone would be enough to convince someone to rewrite the code sections in question. In addition, there is definitely a place for rewriting code that has bad style -- if you have the time to do so. For example, there used to be a programmer here who wrote scripts in Perl that look like entries into an obfu contest. They're valid Perl, and they do what was asked. But management has decided that a lot of these scripts need to be updated for maintainability. Not to mention that some of the scripts needed minor changes that took weeks to implement due to coding style. You don't have to point at anyone and say "Your style sucks! You should never write another program!". You can easily do this without personal attacks, which is what I think you mean by not being blunt. So since you've already made that point I won't reiterate it. :)	[reply]

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Re: Re: Bad Practice
by Nkuvu (Priest) on Feb 27, 2003 at 19:17 UTC

The code may work as is, but as has already been pointed out in the thread there are some potential security issues as well. I'd think that alone would be enough to convince someone to rewrite the code sections in question.

In addition, there is definitely a place for rewriting code that has bad style -- if you have the time to do so. For example, there used to be a programmer here who wrote scripts in Perl that look like entries into an obfu contest. They're valid Perl, and they do what was asked. But management has decided that a lot of these scripts need to be updated for maintainability. Not to mention that some of the scripts needed minor changes that took weeks to implement due to coding style.

You don't have to point at anyone and say "Your style sucks! You should never write another program!". You can easily do this without personal attacks, which is what I think you mean by not being blunt. So since you've already made that point I won't reiterate it. :)

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