I remember that my first contact with programming loops was through the for statement and I used it almost exclusively for many years. I’ll explain why I’ve been favoring while loops over for loops in the past couple years. Beware that this is only my personal preference and the reasoning behind it are very subjective. Use what works better for you.
TL;DR: while is less verbose and more clear in many cases.
(not sure if the pirate image + caption was created by Zeh Fernando, he sent it to me a couple years ago, forgot to ask him…)
Another polemic subject and something that I’ve been delaying for a while, I’ll try to explain how I got to my conclusions and I’m sure a lot of people won’t agree until they experience the same problem or realize how often it may happen on a real project and specially if it does happen with a code you don’t “own” and/or can’t change without compromising future updates… The advice is mostly about JavaScript (since it’s what I’ve been coding more lately and where I think the issue is bigger) but it also fits other languages.
Not so long ago I had an opposite opinion about this subject - I would always set everything to private and only changed to protected/public if needed - try to understand what made me change my opinion and pay attention every time you find yourself “tied” or doing lots of hacks just because you can’t monkey-patch a simple function/variable.
This post is very polemic, I thought a lot before publishing it, please try to be open-minded and read the whole thing before commenting, it is not supposed to become a flame war. Please read the about page to understand the objective of this blog and the way I think about it.
I’ve been considering to use a CSS pre-processor like SASS, LESS, Stylus, etc, for a very long time. Every time someone asked me if I was using any of these tools/languages I would say that I’m kinda used to my current workflow and I don’t really see a reason for changing it since the problems those languages solves are not really the problems I’m having with CSS. Then yesterday I read two blog posts which made me reconsider my point of view so I decided to spend some time today studying the alternatives (once again) and porting some code to check the output and if the languages would really help to keep my code more organized/maintainable and/or if it would make the development process easier (also if they evolved on the past few years).
Clear and descriptive names can increase a lot the readability and the understanding of a certain API or application, in some cases it can be a decisive factor on the success of a project.
I will share a few rules that I started following on the past years after reading many books and blogs about development, discussing with co-workers about it and mostly by experience. Most of the rules may seem dumb/obvious to a seasoned developer, but it is really impressive how many APIs from well-known libraries commit some huge mistakes and I think that a lot of people still don’t care about it as much as they should… I try to follow these rules as much as possible since I believe they contribute a lot for the quality and maintainability of my code but some people may not agree with my naming conventions and sometimes rules should be bent[1] or even ignored, take it as an advice not as a something “set in stone”.
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I know this subject is controversial but I have to say it…
I started using JavaDoc-style documentation since FlashDevelop and FDT use it for code hinting and it used to help me a lot, but since nowadays I’m coding way more JavaScript and the editors I use don’t support JSDoc I don’t think it pays-off…
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