Bad Programming Practice #2

Misusing CTRL+V

It seems innocent enough. You write a snippet of code that causes tulips to spring up all over the computer screen. The users rejoice. Some time later they decide they want the option to see sunflowers as well. They're both flowers and your time is precious so you decide the quickest way is to copy the tulip code, and replace tulip with sunflower. Problem solved. The users rejoice again.

The years pass. Each time the users request another type of flower: CTRL+C, CTRL+V, Modify. Then one day... you discover your original tulip desktop function has the ugly side effect of slowly filling the user's hard drive with temporary files in random locations until it chokes. Only now you have 500 modifications of the same function, many of which barely resemble the original and they all have the same problem. It takes months to fix and even after you release Flower Desktop 10.0 SP1 you're still not sure if you found them all. Mean while, your users grow tired of manually hunting for randomly placed temporary files while waiting for you to fix the problem and decide to replace your program with the cool new Flaming Desktop 1.0 they just finished downloading. You flog yourself repeatedly for copying and pasting to save time when it would've only taken slightly longer to modify your tulip function to take the type of flower as a parameter. Saving you all this work hunting down evil clones of ShowTulips().

Bad Programming Practice #1

Hard coding a path that only exists on your development machine

MyPath = "C:\Foo\Bar";

Let's faced it. This is just lazy. It doesn't matter if you are the only one working on the project. You will eventually move to another machine or someone else will be added to the project. Next thing you know you're pulling your hair out trying to figure out why it works on one machine but not the other. By hard coding the path you've created a dependency on the exact folder structure of your hard drive.

What's worse is that you're not only forcing this on yourself or another developer but possibly the end-user as well. Save everybody some frustration and use paths relative to the main executable or if warranted, make the path configurable by the end user.