do any of you others have little coding mantras that save your behind?

[Sander Rossel]

I have a few. The popular "if you're doing single line if statements you're doing it wrong." The equally catchy "only psycho's don't put spaces between their operands and operators." And my personal favorite "what would codewitch do, do the opposite." :D And one that's not so much related to code, but to specs. If it'll never happen, it'll happen soon (or it'll never never happen, but people don't tend to understand that one).

Best, Sander sanderrossel.com Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript Object-Oriented Programming in C# Succinctly

[Maximilien]

[code like your colleagues are serial killers.](https://blog.codinghorror.com/coding-for-violent-psychopaths/)

I'd rather be phishing!

[OriginalGriff]

They are serial killers, aren't they? Or is that just me? :~

Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640 Never throw anything away, Griff Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!

[Marc Clifton]

Don't write an if unless you know what the else does and why. if and switch statements can be replaced with object inheritance. Let compiler do the work for you! Anything can be written with map-reduce-filter if you try hard enough. Don't try too hard. If you're about to write some code, stop.

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[Jorgen Andersson]

I try to avoid adding a comparison to a comparison. And if I do I don't do Yoda conditions.

Wrong is evil and must be defeated. - Jeff Ello

[honey the codewitch]

all good rules of thumb although the if/switch one gets sticky so that's a rule to be bent a LOT. still, the idea is sound - don't use conditionals where you can use polymorphism although in .NET the runtime still does work to cast :(

When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.

[honey the codewitch]

heh. The yoda conditionals were hammered into me in the late 80s/early 90s. The multiple comparisons are a necessary evil, as TKey isn't directly comparable. You have to use its IComparable interface. Oh how I wish .NET would let you declare a contract on operators. You can't. It's a limitation of .NET's generic types.

When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.

[Rick York]

Think twice, write once.

"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"

[honey the codewitch]

only twice? I find a bout of analysis paralysis followed by headdesking a few times is really the way to go. :laugh:

When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.

[David ONeil]

If you can't find a way to keep your logic nested <= three levels deep, find another profession or project, because you certainly don't want to be the one to debug that sucker. A function is an acceptable solution.

The forgotten roots of science | C++ Programming | DWinLib

[honey the codewitch]

I think it depends on the logic, and should be amended to non-trivial logic, because I wouldn't count things like null checks - validation - that sort of thing, unless they're convoluted. But that's me, and it served me well enough. Usually my debugger problems are complicated. I almost never actually debug. I Ctrl+F5 in visual studio and I either get the expected result, or usually I know where I went wrong because I develop very iteratively.

When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.

[Rick York]

It's a metaphorical twice as in more than once. Although I have found sometimes just taking a shot in the dark can be useful if you can learn from failure.

"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"

[honey the codewitch]

I hear you. I just did that. But I learned from success. I mean, I was working from some sample code, in C++, on implementing B+ trees, but I ported it to C# and then rewrote it using .NETisms and adding features. Then I realized it was almost pointless without a little database system going with it because it only optimized situations where nodes are directly tied to disk access. On the other hand, I did the same thing with the regular B tree and it worked flawlessly, and is useful as an in-memory autobalancing tree structure (inserts and deletions are slow, searches are very fast and consistent - every search takes the same number of comparisons) so woo. but i guess someone already implemented one here. Not sure how mine stacks up, but it works.

When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.

[Member 9167057]

Something similar: Never compare floats for equality. It may bite sooner than later.

[xtofl]

* How would I explain this code to the cleaning personnel * If you can explain how it's done, you can script it

[Richard Deeming]

Another reason to avoid "Yoda conditionals":

if (10 > 5)
if (10.CompareTo(5) > 0)

:)

---

"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined." - Homer

[S Houghtelin]

My mantra is "Dammit! Dammit! Dammit!". Way back when learning C, to help me remember to add the extra equal sign when writing a conditional statement as opposed to an assignment I would say "Equals to" and press the equal sign == for each word and to say "Equals" and only hit the equal = sign once for assigning a value.

It was broke, so I fixed it.

[User 12228503]

"Developers may come and go, but bugs will stay forever"

[Gary Wheeler]

Yep. Been there, done that, got the scars on my back from self-flagellation for trying it.

Software Zen: delete this;

[Kent K]

Similar to the woodworking saying - measure twice, cut once.