When there’s always more than one way to do it, you can constantly surprise the unsuspecting maintainer. The next step is to master the unexpected.Įxpressive languages help you affect an inconsistent coding style, because you can randomly select different idioms for code that would otherwise be similar. If you can recognise each coder’s personal style in the code, you’re only halfway to unmaintainable inconsistency. Inconsistency is another kind of selfish laziness, because consistency requires effort. Coding styleīeyond naming, there are broader questions of coding style that give you an opportunity to prevent maintainability.Ĭhief among your stylistic weapons is inconsistency.

Personal names are deliberately meaningless, as far as the actual code goes, and are only better than numbers in that they are easier to remember (as long as they were your pets or crushes). If the honest uselessness of short names feels weak, you can also consider personal names, such as names of your pets or school crushes. To make it hard for people to attack short names, you’ll need some (bogus) arguments for using them and building up a short-names-are-better coding style for your project, or even a whole programming language community. However, short variable names are vulnerable to constructive renaming. That’s selfish laziness, by the way, not constructive laziness. Single-letter names represent the ultimate laziness in naming. More importantly, your approach to naming provides the greatest opportunity to write unmaintainable code. Here are a few highlights, to give you an idea of what you can learn. Languages & formats: mix them, invent your own.Documentation: lie, state the obvious, leave placeholders.Code structure: copy-paste, break encapsulation, use global/static members, wrap unnecessarily.Coding style: obfuscate, ‘optimise’, avoid consistency.Naming: use single-letters, typos and a baby name book.Unmaintainable code comes from five core practices: If you’ve written much code, you’re likely to feel very seen. What appears to start out as simple humour, quickly reveals satire, farce and ultimately harsh judgement. How To Write Unmaintainable Code by Roedy Green is a classic text for all programmers.

Tribute to the classic thesis by Roedy Green #code #maintenance Writing by Peter Hilton How to write unmaintainable code How to write unmaintainable code - Peter Hilton

Maintainable code