On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 6:29 AM, Dotan Cohen <[email protected]> wrote:
> I wrote a short page on how to actually type of code that one writes,
> it can be found here:
> http://dotancohen.com/howto/write_code.html
>
> The point that I stress on the page is that first you close an
> element, then you fill it's contents. The page has examples in HTML
> and PHP. I would like to know what the experienced programmers here
> think about this. Am I going about it wrong?
I'll be the first to tell you that I'm not a great programmer, so my
take may not be worth a lot. However, this is pretty close to how I
write. Not exactly, but close. I also always label open and closing
brackets on everything, unless the brackets are less than three lines
apart. For instance, I might find myself writing:
if($foo == 'bar')
{ # Begin foo=bar test
# If foo=bar, do a lot of things.
} # End foo=bar test
Then I go back and fill in the conditional stuff. I've found two sets
of benefits to doing things this way.
1) I don't forget to close the brackets later, and I know they're
indented properly.
2) The comments mean that if I get to the beginning of a section and
want to skip to the end, I can just search for whatever comes after
"Begin", and know that the next instance will be the end of that
section.
I also tend to document my code in comments before I start writing
actual code. I frequently find that that helps keep me on track,
rather than getting distracted by random new features that occur to me
after I start. It also means that when the time comes to document
what I did, most of it is already there... that's saved me a few
times. (I tend to wind up with about a 2:1 ratio of comments to code,
which at least means I can figure out later what I was thinking when I
wrote that horrible mess.)
So I can't say whether it's worthwhile practice for a good programmer
who writes on a regular basis: for someone like me, who throws
together an occasional script to save time later, or a personal
web-site that needs a database backend, it can save a lot of
aggravation.
-Alex
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