7:22 PM - (rant) Idiots should not be allowed to write code
I'm sick of bad programming practices. So many people "learn" to program just enough to get by. They don't care if their spacing is chaotic, if it's hard to read, if some statements go across the page in one line, if they initialize big objects 10 times in a function, or even if the code is efficient. They don't comment their code! How am I supposed to know what it does without spending a great deal of time reading it?
This is a problem at work. I've been asked to modify a terrible joomla plugin. There is zero documentation for this plugin. The author put his name on it and some ads for his company. I will never buy anything from him. He's spelled variables such as wordLength as wordLenght throughout the code. Spelling length wrong once happens, but an entire plugin with hundreds of lines? In the database table?
Depending on what my final patch looks like, I might submit a big diff with whitespace fixes, and code cleanup to this jackass. If for no other reason, so he can see how to program.
Another problem I'm seeing is with object initialization. In another project, I see 5 calls to getContext() within one method. This creates a heavy object for one use and then leaves it in memory for the call. Then java has to garbage collect it eventually. It's slow to GC and it's slow to create it. What a waste of everyone's time. Not just my time, but the poor guy who's got to use that shitty website. Why take 5 seconds when you can take 30?
Computer science professors need to require comments, and clean code or fail people. It's that simple. They need to learn to do this. Some professors at WMU do that, and I think it's a good idea.