Seven ineffective coding habits of many programmers - Kevlin Henney

Breakout session from DevWeek 2014
devweek.com/

[@edgeeffect]

Talking about crossing the road, Kevlin reminded me of two amusing variations on "The Green Cross Code". London: 1. Stand by the kerb 2. wait for other pedestrians to join you 3. when you've reached critical mass, all cross the road together only using psychic communication to initiate this. Napoli 1. Just walk across the road, the vehicles will swerve around you.

[@MariusSeebach]

The first half is quite good. The audio somehow got worse in the second half.

[@axelBr1]

Removing Exception from the name of an Exception!. People using Hungarian notation going to have a meltdown.

[@Salantor]

After watching more of Kevlin's talk from 2015 and onwards I came to realization that on every conference he basically does the same talk, only slightly modified (updated?). I mean, this Shakespear joke I heard at least three times, and the same goes for the code clarity, unnecessary words et cetera. You watch one, maybe two of his talks and you basically watched them all.

[@johnzabroski5396]

Maybe, but the side effect of him repeating himself over and over again is it's super easy for me to find a copy of his 7 Habits talk and send it to coworkers. Plus, I take it the world still has as many ineffective programmers as it did before.

[@edgeeffect]

Not that I'm disagreeing with you in the slightest... but I still watch all the other ones anyway.

[@PedroCouto1982]

The subjects are different and it seems there are always different ideas. But I agree he reuses the same jokes, examples, references, and other ideas.

[@prostudioservice3301]

Audio quality on second half is bad because it's from the camera that is far away. Something happen to portable audio recorder. Maybe battery was low.

[@nicholaslogan5185]

I rather enjoy his story telling style.

[@cepi24]

Do not get me wrong but I've never finished any talk of this guy. I guess that somebody who is talking about code efficiency should not talk more than hour about 7 rules. My humble opinion.

[@llothar68]

The more he talks the more he get payed for. It's a mistake of DevWeek to not put him into a 30min slot

[@Mish844]

we could just name the rules and be done with it, but then my experience with coders is that they aren't superhuman - give them a rule without reasoning and they will treat it like dogma. With that being said, it is a talk he's done so many times that I think I saw versions that last less than hour, so it can be done faster.

[@WoofgangPrime]

Complain about grammatical errors. Proceed to make up a word like underabstraction and use the adjective uncohesive as a noun. 😱

[@BryonLape]

Navy reorder problem

[@EmilNicolaiePerhinschi]

no, people don't read the way he says People use clue in the text to keep track; if there are no clues (like the ancients used to write without capital letters or spaces or punctuation) then 60 columns are too many to keep track where you are. If you use capitalization and horizontal spaces and punctuation you can go longer, that's why modern books published with 120-150 letters per line still sell. Books published before the 1950s stuck to narrower columns because they did not use much vertical spacing between paragraphs and and were printed on bad paper. If there are lots of clues like syntax highlighting provided in modern editors you can go safely to 120. You should not use 120 all the time but hard limits to 80 ( or even worse, 72) are stupid and counterproductive, you get unreadable names and bizarre indentations.

[@Mish844]

Another thing worth mentioning that the column number is often inflated by whitespaces due to indentation. If we're talking smth like c# that's 3 levels: namespace, class, method, so that is around 12-15 characters with nothing to attract your eyes. 60-80 columns that allegedly we read is with implied assumption that it is from the beginning where the text begins. As a result, often even if we take his word for it we can safely add no fewer than 10 characters to that limit.

[@BenRangel]

Sooo long winded. For a guy talking about signal vs noise he's sure got a lot of meandering and build up in his talks. First fifteen minutes made me give up.

[@anthonyvays5786]

I feel so bad for anyone who had to work with this guy

[@foljs5858]

You feel bad for anyone who had to work with a well respected programmer and author. Sure. I feel even worse for anyone who had to work with people with your kind of comments...

[@Mish844]

@@foljs5858 I had to. The kind that think writing code in english and not just programming language is a waste of time, resulting in wasting time of entire team, trying to fix their mistakes, when inevitably they had to change smth in behaviour of that code. Been there, never want to be there again.