Re^2: warnings and strict -- The 2 Best Ways You Can Improve Your Programming

I'm not sure that's true, for programmers, or for authors, either.

From a career point of view, hiring an editor makes you a better writer, in the sense that your career will improve. Without one, you'll probably never get hired; it's very hard to see your own typos and spelling mistakes, and if you publish a newspaper full of typos and spelling mistakes, no one will take you seriously. Worse yet, you'll re-inforce your mistakes, and learn bad spelling.

A spelling and grammer checker don't quite equal a good copy editor, but they're a decent first order approximation. Not using them will only hurt.

Similarly, using strictness and warnings are a good first step towards good coding practices. No, they don't help you directly with your program content, but they help you make sure you spend your time writing content, and less time editing for correctness.

Comment on Re^2: warnings and strict -- The 2 Best Ways You Can Improve Your Programming

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^3: warnings and strict -- The 2 Best Ways You Can Improve Your Programming by itub (Priest) on Oct 05, 2005 at 18:31 UTC
Now that you mention grammar checkers, the following analogy suddenly occured to me: strict is to a spellchecker as warnings is to a grammar checker. In which sense? In my experience, both strict and the spelling checker point out real problems at least 90% of the time, making them highly effective and not too annoying. But warnings and the grammar checker are right less than 50% of the time, which can make them too annoying. ;-)	[reply]

Replies are listed 'Best First'.

Re^3: warnings and strict -- The 2 Best Ways You Can Improve Your Programming
by itub (Priest) on Oct 05, 2005 at 18:31 UTC

strict is to a spellchecker as warnings is to a grammar checker

In which sense? In my experience, both strict and the spelling checker point out real problems at least 90% of the time, making them highly effective and not too annoying. But warnings and the grammar checker are right less than 50% of the time, which can make them too annoying. ;-)

[reply]