I have a couple of rules that I try to impress on people, usually people fresh out of college, who believe that they understand everything there is to know about programming. The first is the idea that there are very few inherently hard programs. If you're looking at a piece of code and it looks very hard—if you can't understand what this thing is supposed to be doing—that's almost always an indication that it was poorly thought through. At that point you don't roll up your sleeves and try to fix the code; you take a step back and think it through again. When you've thought it through enough,
...more
