I try to avoid mixed case and plurals when programming. And what the hell is ctr? And how is that "good"? I would assume counter. But I could just as easily assume counter terrorism resource, or counter technology regulation, or candice t. rice. At least we've progressed past the point of dropping all vowels to keep names <= 8 characters. At least on some of the languages and platforms.

The inference of counter from ctr in the context of "mainLoop" is a reasonable expectation of an experienced and thoughtful programmer. If you want to go the Full Monty, there's nothing wrong with that either.

Mixing cases makes it easier for your eyes to discern word separations and I hate typing underscores. What is important is the brain has a reason to break up words. If you don't think that's necessary, I suggest you download a plaintext book. Put it in a text editor, remove all spaces and punctuation and then tell us how much fun it was to read. I also prefer Allman braces, but there's real science in that preference. The science of the brain's love of symmetry and left-right eye movement + refocusing's contribution to eye fatigue and headaches.

Why Allman hasn't forced out all others on principals of body science alone is beyond me. Excessive eye movement leads to fatigue, when searching for braces, up and down are always necessary. Left and right eye movement are only necessary should one prefer a brace style based upon inefficient design.

on the subject of casing variables I use cased names for globals and all lower case for local variable, it makes it easy to see what the scope is at a glance.

Several guidelines for the pragmatic programmer:

(1) Don't try to re-write it. Just don't. I know that it stinks. Find a way to make the modification that best suits the particular trouble-ticket or change-order that you have been assigned. Don't go beyond the scope of that.

(2) Make your code look, and work, like what's there. Follow their de facto standards for variable naming, indentation, and so on. Use the objects that they used. I know that it stinks. Don't make it more evident than it already is that fifty people have been working on it for thirty years.

(3) Test the holy hell out of it, before you commit your branch, and don't merge it right away into the trunk. Your modification should include automatically-runnable(!) tests which will verify that the requirements of the ticket or change-order have been exactly met. Someone else will be responsible for desk-checking your work and merging it into the trunk.

(4) Don't write anything that has not been ordered. If the change-order or trouble-ticket does not expressly authorize it, don't do it. I know that it stinks. But, these are the changes – the only changes – that have been signed-off on from above. The rest of the code-base either works now, or contains defects that are probably known. (If you discover another defect, write it up.) Your change has been approved because it is understood to be limited and focused. So, it must be.

Yes, good programmers use version control. Your terminology sounds like you're still using subversion though...

Subversion is awesome, isn't it? Anywhere source/data on the fly.
I wonder if it could be maybe made a bit littler subversion package.

My list is much shorter. In descending order of importance, every good programmer should be:

1. Arrogant
2. Stubborn
3. Slightly crazy
4. Intelligent

That's not much helpful, rather off-topic

No, that is the exact opposite of good.

Even if you're working excusively as a one-person team.

Then Lennart Poettering must be the greatest programmer ever!

Actually, he did have a great, amazing, success. Today, SystemD is on most distributions. Does it prove the validity of the above rules?

I don't think that SystemD is that bad at all, since it only depends on the Unix-like distributions.

To smooth off the comment, there is actually some good in SystemD. Next to PulseAudio, it allows to have a nice system ideally suited for Ubuntu. Ubuntu isn't that bad, and SystemD is a nice add-on. SystemD is perfect for the desktop target of Ubuntu. Pulseaudio, Avahi, SystemD and more to come is a good solution for an Unix-like OS as Ubuntu. Ubuntu users usually do not matter that much that it is pulseaudio, sysD, or other. They are focused on desktop use. Despite the programming content, Pulseaudio and SystemD are being widely used and look rather stable enough for these type of distributions and for full user satisfactions. Ubuntu has become a widely installed and used distribution. Nothing to say, Ubuntu is present as a recognized Linux distribution.

(DE: https://www.golem.de/news/lennart-po...10-109649.html)

Can we leave systemd out of one discussion please?

Other than that...

rules+=1: Don't mix code. That is not to say, you can't use more than one language, just make sure they're in separate files of the appropriate suffix.

Actually, not usually. But the essential notion is that the release process (even "release to testing") is usually done by someone else other than the person(s) who developed the content of the fix- or feature-branch.

- - - - -

As for personal qualities, I would really prefer, "reliable, disciplined, and easy to work with." Don't need ego, and you're not as intelligent as you think you are, or if you are then nobody really cares because they know of course that they are much smarter than you. The one thing that I say to any team that I work with is: "Don't surprise me. I don't like surprises."

Oh god, yes.

When you work with bash (for example) and scripts usually you embed all of the sed/awk/whatever code into the shell script itself.