Good Habits for Great Coding: Improving Programming Skills with Examples in Python

© Michael Stueben 2018

Michael StuebenGood Habits for Great Codinghttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3459-4_3

3. Style

Michael Stueben^1 

(1)

Falls Church, Virginia, USA

 

• The hard-science people rarely know how to write, and most of them don’t know how to program either; they’re taught how to code up an algorithm, not how to write a maintainable computer program.—Allen I. Holub, Enough Rope to Shoot Yourself in the Foot (McGraw-Hill, 1995), page 18.

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• Readability, I have been told, is not everything. Neither is breathing, but it does come before whatever comes next.—William Sloane, The Craft of Writing, (W.W. Norton, 1979), page 11.

Style is anticipating the difficulty others will have understanding , debugging , modifying , and using ...