The problem with this industry, software development, is that it didn't yet get that programmers are beginners for a very long time. Like the human child, it ta

The problem with this industry, software development, is that it didn't yet get that programmers are beginners for a very long time. Like the human child, it takes 20 years of programming experience to mature a programmer and before that he's just a child. Let's assume I'm right here for a minute. If most programmers then are intermediate programmers, what kind of advise needs most to be given knowing businesses needs to run? The ones that do "damage control". There is no issue with that, it's ok to do damage control. Let's take some example. "readable code". Yes for an intermediate programmer it is a good thing if the code is not too dense because those code tend to draw all the programmer's energy when he tries to make sense of it. But as the programmer get experience, he can read more and more dense code to finally be able to get in a glimpse what looks like obfuscated code to others. For a mature programmer, the important point not readability, it is for the code to be as small as possible which generally tend to produce very dense code. The mature programmer draws on his abilities to understand obfuscated code to write even better code. "write a test first" (beside the fact you're here actually asking a beginner to solve his code problems by writing more code which is at best controversial to me). A mature programmer don't write a test first, he thinks that way already - and yes he delivers code that has less than a percent failure rate. Now, some code may require unit tests, I'm not saying this is wrong in every situation, it's just not right in every situation. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is: I wish we have a way to finally make a clear distinction between good advises for intermediate programmers and what is actually mature programming because it's very different - the mature programmer gonna make the function as big as it make sense to be, he isn't gonna artificially break up his body into small functions to make it more readable: he can read the code already.