Coding is Bad for Your Code

Like so many other tasks, coding requires a certain amount of knowledge, experience and craftsmanship. Over the years I have come across many developers who don't even know the common best practices of their respective bread & butter language. Even worse, when they don't even suspect that there could be concepts beyond what language syntax and semantics provide for.

As a first step C/C++ developers should have read Scott Meyers' books and Java developers should know Josh Bloch's Effective Java by heart.

WRT to the (ultra-short) post this item links to, IMHO designing everything up front is neither feasible nor possible at all for any but the most trivial projects. That is something that at least the advent of agile methods even within the most conservative corporations should have taught us.

What is lacking in software development are neither the tools nor an atmosphere of less pressure. Much rather it is the sensibility for decent craftsmanship and engineering - and the knowledge of the means on how to acquire such.