I can tell you are a math guy

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By jack Herrington - Posted on 25 June 2008

I can look over someone's code and tell if they are a slumming math guy. In other words, the guy who has a PhD in some esoteric math field, but now, for some reason, has to demean himself to coding for a living. Here are a few clues I see in the code:

  • You use i, j, k, l as variable names, liberally.
  • Your objects have no clear separation of responsibility.
  • You pass way too much between functions as member variables, globals and so on.
  • You don't make any use of reasonable language features like access controls, statics, constants, or anything like that.
  • Your indenting looks like you just smoked some meth.
  • You have no problem have three lines of continuous equation with no temporary variables.
  • All of your data structures are arrays where each index has a special meaning.
  • You have functions to convert between zero based arrays and one based arrays.
  • All of the variables in your functions or methods are defined at the top regardless of when they are used.

Sorry to rant. I just spent an hour on a code fragment cleaning it up where each step I took I would run it again, see if I got the same result, then clean a little more and so on.