Ask HN: How has your programming style changed over time?

I write simpler code because it's easier to understand and maintain, for me and coworkers. It took so long to write like one thinks a junior dev would write :-)

Another change is a consequence of being polyglot (mainly Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Elixir now plus some C and PHP.) I can see where language and library designers go out of their way to make things unnecessarily complicated, or where the idiomatic way of a language is stubbornly complex. I try to stay idiomatic because it helps maintenance but I pick simple solutions anytime I can.

Finally, as the other reply states, I got better and more verbose at naming. One good name could be worth 100 words in a comment. It's like placing a big red Stop button in the middle of a dashboard instead of hiding it, small and black, under the desk.

Ah, I write down a lot of things in wikis. Coworkers thank me but they still don't write anything. They're about 10 years younger than me, they'll get there too (to document stuff).

To name just a few:

- In high school (early 2000's), and through most of college I was mostly writing programs in simple text editors and debugging with print statements. Since then, using IDE's and other more featured editors, and eventually chrome devtools, completely changed that.

- Also in secondary school, my variable names were pretty bad, and even sometimes an intentional joke. Today, I'm pretty verbose in function/var naming.

- Never used to spend time writing useful comments.

In the mid 80s.

The main change, I think, was a vast improvement immediately after reading Refactoring and Clean Code.