Mailinglist Archive

[This is a good article with concepts that can be useful even to
non-coders.  -  jjk]

Six ways to write more comprehensible code
How to keep your code from destroying you
Jeff Vogel (spidweb@spiderwebsoftware.com), President, Spiderweb
Software
29 May 2007

As a developer, time is your most valuable resource. These six tips on
how to write maintainable code are guaranteed to save you time and
frustration: one minute spent writing comments can save you an hour of
anguish.

I learned to write, clear, maintainable code the hard way. For the last
twelve years, I've made my living writing computer games and selling
them over the Net using the marketing technique that was once charmingly
known as shareware. What this means is that I start with a blank screen,
start coding, and, a few tens of thousands of lines of code later, I
have something to sell. 

This means that, if I make a stinky mess, I'm doing it in my own nest.
When I'm chasing down a bug at 3 a.m., staring at a nightmare cloud of
spaghetti code, and I say, "Dear God, what idiot child of married
cousins wrote this garbage?", the answer to that question is "Me."

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-clear-code/?S_TACT=105AGX54&S_CMP=NLLX