A few weeks ago, Charles Miller wrote about some theories of behavior and how they apply to coding. Basically, he says that it’s important to make sure little badnesses don’t creep in, because they add up, and discourage fellow coders from fighting future badnesses, and eventually, there’s badness everywhere.

I totally agree. As a developer, I find my main enemies to be noise and inertia. Noise is anything that detracts from the good qualities of the code (clear intent, good performance, flexible structure, and so on). Noise adds friction to the development process by making it difficult to move forward. Inertia is anything that makes change difficult, which includes all the noise.

For example, anyone who has worked with me knows that I am an absolute fanatic about coding conventions. I believe they are important because they reduce noise: when I look at a chunk of code I didn’t write, I need as little noise as possible. Different brace styles are nothing but noise. Some people will argue that it’s silly to legislate code style because it isn’t important to the functioning of the code: the compiler doesn’t care where the braces go, so why should we?

The answer is, it’s important to decide on a single style precisely because it doesn’t matter to the functioning of the code. Everything possible must be done to focus developers on the things that matter, and having to accommodate everyone’s style makes all the other developers (except you) spend focus on reading your particular coding style.

And of course, divergent style is the least of the badnesses that can infest your code. Worse are bad architecture, mushy semantics, poor performance, incorrect functionality, and so on. These are the kinds of things that get into the code and can be very difficult to remove, especially when the whole team is under constant time pressure to deliver new features.

Only by being merciless about fighting small badnesses all the time can you ensure that at the end of two years and eight people’s work you have a large pile of goodness.