Writing maintainable code [closed]

Answer 1

Programming is performance; you should never forget who your audience is. "Code as if the person who ends up maintaining your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live."

Answer 2

small, well defined functions and classes.

It's pretty easy to get used to other people's various coding conventions but if everything is in one giant class or function, my head explodes.

Answer 3

I prefer it when people prune and shape the code as it grows. Too often you find an original spine of decent architecture with a huge cludgy mess hanging off it.

Answer 4

Good comments can make even the worst spaghetti code 10x easier to maintain.

Answer 5

Plenty of whitespace. - High density code is hard to comprehend. If you have more than 6 lines wihtout a blank line, then that group is probably not a cohesive thought/idea/operation.

Good variable names - explanatory, but succinct. Huge variable names are as bad as tiny ones.

Answer 6

Finding a good mentor. This person doesn't necessarily have to be a better coder than you, however they should be able to suggest other strategies for writing code properly. A good mentor will be to suggest many of the answers previously given to this topic. They can be a second set of eyes that let you know where your short comings are, while maintaining an encouraging, optimistic tone. They will also be flexible and constantly honing their skills as should you. That way when the next big paradigm comes up you'll be better able to separate the chaff from the wheat. This will be invaluable when Object Oriented Programming and Source Control are replaced by the next big thing (hard to imagine I know.)