Comments on: Five things I wish I’d known when I started programming

By: Job

Job — Sat, 15 Jul 2006 16:37:55 +0000

In my initial days, when i had little knowledge of how code compiles, i thought it would be faster to use math expressions rather than conditionals, thinking: “long code is slow code”.
I managed to avoid most if statements by converting these into a long math expression. My favourite operations were Math.Round(), Math.Floor(), Math.Ceil(), Math.sqrt(), besides the traditional +-*/.
The disadvantage of this is twofold:
- you can’t read it
- it’s alot slower because most of the time i would be substituting a bunch of nested if statements with a single expression composed of alot of operations.

With if statements the code is alot longer, but the program execution goes through those statements very fast, like in a tree, taking log(n) time instead of the k*n operations of the math approach.
Now THAT is bad. :)

By: Phil Newton

Phil Newton — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 21:40:57 +0000

At least you give an explanation for them. My single letter variables used to crop up all over the place, and they were all globals as well. Sometimes I wonder how I managed to complete anything back then.

By: Katy

Katy — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 15:08:00 +0000

I completely agree about the comments bit.

The number of times I’ve looked at code and it’s taken me 3 times as long to fix because the comments are so bad (or there aren’t any at all).

The one thing I do though to keep myself happy is use strange variable names (which I know is bad form but I do DIM them with an explanation at the top of the page).

My current favourites are Dilbert, Dogbert, Ratbert, Catbert and PHB.

Sad, I know… :p