If you architect and code the app properly, this should be a very simple change, as the mechanics of the management app should be decoupled from the datatypes and only include type specific code when really needed.

Anyway, nice articles.

If I liked coffee I would agree - I see your point though :p

The best thing you can do to make a block of code understandable is to facilitate seeing the entire block in a single page on the screen. Comments, unfortunately, get in the way of this goal. It may seem counterintuitive to avoid comments, but if you focus on the goal of making the code understandable, instead of the comments, you’ll realize when comments are appropriate and when they are in appropriate.

2, 3 and 4. You must have some morons there, why are you there?

5. Agreed. [ferdhie] you idiot, get into the 21st century already, OOP makes code MUCH more manageable!

6. Get used to it, allow for change, many people are fickle and confused, but makes damn sure you have an approved prior specification, so that you have the option to charge them extra for any changes

Anyone who uses the label coder shows their amateurishness, if you want to bitch like this first learn some professionalism, learn to tolerate some customer stupidity, however still have some standards about who you work for, I assume you are getting paid well to put up with this!

Professionals often start as programmers then may call themselves developers, because they often do a lot more than just programming e.g. analysis, architecture, design, testing, releases, diagnostics and maintenance; companies often call these people Analyst Programmers or even Developers e.g. the implementation can be only 30% of my time, the rest of the time is often spent on a mix of design, testing, debugging and release preparation.

Isn’t there something of a contradiction there…?

variable names with no meaning. Like x1, xx1, xa1, xb2. this pisses me off often.

I’ve had this problem myself.
It’s not hard to type something descriptive like ‘name’ or ‘url’ and it’s easier to remember what a descriptive variable is for if you need to go back to your code in the future.
Variables like ‘i’ and ’s’ are acceptable when used properly (as temporary variables for things like for loops) and even then, they are descriptive to some degree (Integer and String data types).

I always use descriptive variable names as it means I have to use less comments as I can make my code more readable.

For loops if I need to create a new temporary variable I usually name it after whatever it is looping (and add ‘_loop’ to the end of it). But then I always destroy temporary variables once I’m done with them.