Good Code, Bad Code

7 Make code hard to misuse

This chapter covers

• How the misuse of code can lead to bugs
• Common ways code can be easy to misuse
• Techniques for making code hard to misuse

Chapter 3 discussed how the code we write is often just one piece of the jigsaw in a much larger piece of software. For a piece of software to function correctly the different pieces of code have to fit together and work. If a piece of code is easy to misuse, then the chances are sooner or later it will get misused and the software will not function correctly.

Code is often easy to misuse when there are assumptions baked in that are unintuitive or ambiguous and other engineers are not prevented from doing the wrong thing. Some common ways code can be misused are as follows: ...