The 9 Habits of Highly Ineffective Programmers

To become a great programmer, you must first understand what not to do

Photo by Amanda Souza on Unsplash

Be humble.

Architecting and designing great code isn’t some mythical ideal, it’s something that you must constantly work towards. You need to clarify in your mind exactly what makes a programmer great.

We’re always searching for ways to make our code better and to sharpen our skills, like a butcher’s knife at the chef’s table. What most people fail to cement in their minds is what exactly makes a programmer ineffective. What are the habits that unnoticeably obstruct the path to well-designed and elegant code? This fog in your vision is what dulls that knife you’re constantly working so hard to sharpen.

Therefore, to become truly great and unique in your ability, you must first make yourself aware of the habits and nuances that keep you from progressing. Just like the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step program, the first step to recovery is admitting and making yourself aware of the problem in the first place.

You must develop self-awareness and humility in your own skills, in order to level up to mastery.

Here are the nine most prominent habits that make a programmer ineffective — habits you must avoid picking up at all costs.

1. Bombarding Code With Unnecessary Comments

If you have to explain every single line of code with a comment, you’re doing something wrong.

Your code should be self-commenting and intuitively designed so that any programmer can look at it and almost immediately extract the meaning and goals of your code. Comments are a sign that your code needs restructuring.

Only write comments if you absolutely have to, for example in TODO statements. Otherwise, in order to have clean code, you should remove and delete any unnecessary comments.

2. Writing Very Long Functions

If you find yourself with any functions longer than 15–20 lines, that’s a sure sign they’re doing too many things. This creates a tight coupling between your logic, rendering your code incapable of extension, and subject to too…