Why produce ugly code?

It is amazing that some coders can not give a damn about how their code looks! I’ve seen it plenty of times while I was extending Joomla! compenents for client web sites. The coders simply do not give a h00t! They don’t worry about indentation. They follow no real coding standards. Naming conventions is non-existant. All in all, its damn ugly to look at.

The funny thing about it is that it still works! Although it is almost unreadable, it is stable and it does the job. And strangely enough, more often than not it is fairly simple to extend. It is just so straining on the eye… So obviously these coders are not stupid! They are simply messy…

All aspiring programmers: Make sure your code is “pretty”. It just oozes professionalism and could be a pleasure working with it when extending it! Spescially if it is an Open Source project. If others are going to work on it, then make it at least pretty to look at, please.

I guess this is one of the reasons why Python is so popular. Whether or not you are a sloppy programmer, in Python you HAVE to worry about indentation. At least when you open any Python sources, you know its going to at least look pretty. Python is gaining my respect more and more…

technorati tags:ugly-code, sourcecode, software-development, open-source

Blogged with Flock

4 Comments to "Why produce ugly code?"

• Imel said: On 04/20/2007 at 10:58 am

  Hey Stii, I can speak from experience when I say good intentions as far as coding goes is left at the door as far as big business is concerned.
  When you have a deadline and 148 bugs you need to get through by the end of the week then the last thing on your mind is producing good code. Yes, you waste a lot of time finding the bug simply because of a lack of coding standards, and yes, you probably have some bugs simply because of bad coding standards, but believe me, when you back is against the wall (as is the case almost all the time in most software companies) the last thing you care about is doing it pretty. Getting it out the door is all that matters.
  The number of times people have told me that they will go back and clean things up is to high to remember, and of course, no one ever goes back, the list of outstanding things to get though simply gets bigger and bigger.
  So, I think it will be down to the tools to help us here. Source code formatters is a plus as far as I am concerned, as it stamps down a standard. In my organization we have codes form all over the world, all with their own way of “beatifying” code. We now enforce automation of code beautification by tools rather than people, simply to ensure all code looks the same, as people kept arguing they way of formatting was better and more readable.

  That’s my 2 cents worth anyway

• Charl van Niekerk said: On 04/22/2007 at 12:58 pm

  Imel, you hit the nail right on the spot. This is exactly the same experience I have been having as a professional programmer the last couple of years.

  I am actually quite the perfectionist coder and at least my indentation and code formatting is correct and consistent 99,9% of the time. There is no excuse for me not to have those incorrect because I just make sure they are right as I go along. There’s no gray area there.

  My issues are mainly related to documentation and architecture. There is no such thing as the “perfect” architectural design or the “perfect” documentation. I prefer to first sit down and get my architecture correct and then document as I go along. However, if you document as you’re going along, the code often changes a bit and it’s very easy to forget to update the documentation to match. Then you get put under pressure and scope creep happens. Then your nice architecture goes out the door as well, if you were ever allowed enough time to get that right in the first place.

  (Please note when I mean “documentation” I refer to both inline comments and separate external documentation on a wiki or somewhere else.)

  But I have to agree with you Stii in that most people just do a particularly poor job. However, real world stuff happens.

• Neville Newey said: On 04/22/2007 at 1:57 pm

  Hi Stii, great post. I am with you there on Python, its one of the reasons I love the language although there are others as well. To be sure Python does have some ‘warts’ (len using function syntax despite being a method for example) but on the whole I find pretty code also makes one much more productive. It is possible to write ugly Python code but ugly Python code will always be prettier than ugly perl code

• Neil Blakey-Milner said: On 04/23/2007 at 9:01 am

  It certainly is possible to write ugly looking Python code. But Python does make it harder to do. It’s harder to write code that is hard to understand. But it’s still pretty easy to do, if you just don’t care.

  I think variable and function naming is probably a lot more of an important factor, and a lot easier to keep good yourself, and a lot harder to make others do (and certainly near-impossible to automate with tools).

  The more “experience” I get, the more I’m coming to believe that the thing that separate a good programmer from a bad one is their understanding and respect for the fact that one spends much more time reading and modifying code than writing it. You owe it to future developers, including yourself, to make sure your code is easy to read and understand. The best thing for the sponsor of the code (a company or yourself) is almost always to have understandable code. The hard part is often convincing them (or yourself) of that.

Spit it out!

Filed in: Programming by: Stii