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20 controversial programming opinions

August 29, 2012 by Yannis Rizos. 109 comments

One of the very first ideas we had for this blog was to convert some of the wonderful gems of the early era of our site, the undisciplined period, to blog posts. Questions that were once enthusiastically received by the community, but no longer fit Programmer’s scope.

The first deleted question I’ve chosen is Jon Skeet’s "What’s your most controversial programming opinion?" question (available only to 10K+ users, sorry), a +391 scored question that was originally asked on Stack Overflow on January 2, 2009. What follows are twenty of the highest voted answers, in random order…

Programmers who don’t code in their spare time for fun will never become as good as those that do.

I think even the smartest and most talented people will never become truly good programmers unless they treat it as more than a job. Meaning that they do little projects on the side, or just mess with lots of different languages and ideas in their spare time.<br>by rustyshelf

Unit testing won’t help you write good code.

The only reason to have Unit tests is to make sure that code that already works doesn’t break. Writing tests first, or writing code to the tests is ridiculous. If you write to the tests before the code, you won’t even know what the edge cases are. You could have code that passes the tests but still fails in unforeseen circumstances.

And furthermore, good developers will keep cohesion low, which will make the addition of new code unlikely to cause problems with existing stuff.<br>by Chad Okere

The only "best practice" you should be using all the time is "Use Your Brain".

Too many people jumping on too many bandwagons and trying to force methods, patterns, frameworks, etc. onto things that don’t warrant them. Just because something is new, or because someone respected has an opinion, doesn’t mean it fits all.<br>by Steven Robbins

Most comments in code are in fact a pernicious form of code duplication.

We spend most of our time maintaining code written by others (or ourselves) and poor, incorrect, outdated, misleading comments must be near the top of the list of most annoying artifacts in code.

I think eventually many people just blank them out, especially those flowerbox monstrosities.

Much better to concentrate on making the code readable, refactoring as necessary, and minimising idioms and quirkiness.

On the other hand, many courses teach that comments are very nearly more important than the code itself, leading to the this next line adds one to invoiceTotal style of commenting.<br>by Ed Guiness

"Googling it" is okay!

Yes, I know it offends some people out there that their years of intense memorization and/or glorious stacks of programming books are starting to fall by the wayside to a resource that anyone can access within seconds, but you shouldn’t hold that against people that use it.

Too often I hear googling answers to problems the result of criticism, and it really is without sense. First of all, it must be conceded that everyone needs materials to reference. You don’t know everything and you will need to look things up. Conceding that, does it really matter where you got the information? Does it matter if you looked it up in a book, looked it up on Google, or heard it from a talking frog that you hallucinated? No. A right answer is a right answer.

What is important is that you understand the material, use it as the means to an end of a successful programming solution, and the client/your employer is happy with the results.<br>by PhoenixRedeemer

Not all programmers are created equal.

Quite often managers think that DeveloperA == DeveloperB simply because they have same level of experience and so on. In actual fact, the performance of one developer can be 10x or even 100x that of another.

It’s politically risky to talk about it, but sometimes I feel like pointing out that, even though several team members may appear to be of equal skill, it’s not always the case. I have even seen cases where lead developers were ‘beyond hope’ and junior devs did all the actual work – I made sure they got the credit, though.<br>by Dmitri Nesteruk

I fail to understand why people think that Java is absolutely the best "first" programming language to be taught in universities.

For one, I believe that first programming language should be such that it highlights the need to learn control flow and variables, not objects and syntax.

For another, I believe that people who have not had experience in debugging memory leaks in C / C++ cannot fully appreciate what Java brings to the table.

Also the natural progression...