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Generally good advice, but I disagree with #9 (avoid debuggers, learn to unit test). Unit testing is important perhaps if you have a large project with many con
by emmett 18y ago
Generally good advice, but I disagree with #9 (avoid debuggers, learn to unit test). Unit testing is important perhaps if you have a large project with many contributors, but no good hackers I know learned to program with testing and "Best Practices".
- jgrahamc 18y agoI disagree (but that I did write TFA). I have a piece of commercial software I sell, it has an extensive set of unit tests. I'm the only developer and I wrote them because I need to know that if I ship a new version to my customers that I haven't broken anything. Unit tests give me the flexibility to refactor, improve, bug fix, etc. with the assurance that I'm not messing things up. It would be very costly for me to ship broken code to my customers.
- emmett 18y agoFor sure, but did you start learning to program by using unit tests? "Use unit tests" is great advice for a developer shipping commercial software, and bad advice for a 13 year old who wants to learn to code.
- Tamerlin 18y agoThat sounds contradictory to me. If you learned to program without testing and best practices, then you're not a good programmer, you're just a hack. I don't agree about the debugger though... it's a tool, when used properly a helpful tool, so learn to use it.
- emmett 18y agoThe article is about advice you'd give to a 13 year old who wanted to learn to program, not about how to become a professional software developer. Unit tests are not necessary to learn to program, and thus should be left for later.