A Dozen Programming Tips

I was thinking about what to write when my friend suggested about this topic. It does not mean that I am a good programmer. It only means that after so many years I just know how to manage a program when needed.

1. Start with an easy to learn programming language, like Pascal. This will help you to learn programming rather than the programming language. After you learn programming, you can easily go to complex programming languages like C, C++, Java, etc.
2. Use your time to learn the art of programming. Peter Norvig once said that we need at least 10 years to learn programming. He was right to a certain extent as more we learn programming, more we come to know about our ignorance.
3. Make programming a fun exercise as to maintain the interest for such a long time.
4. Learn to be lazy. It is not at all necessary to write each and every program from scratch. Maintain a library of your own and use the programs when you can. But, you must have a good library.
5. My mom says that a person can be a good cook only if he had eaten good food. Same applies here, so go through as many programs as you can. Analyse them using scientific methods and classify them properly before adding it to your library.
6. Get so involved in programming, that when some program is not running, you think of it as how to solve it. My experience says that most problems are solved in dreams. Make sure you wake up as soon as you find the solution. 😀
7. Talk to other programmers and take help from them. Similarly, help other programmers when you can. This may result in learning new things that you never knew.
8. Join a gang or a community of programmers where you discuss programming and criticize each others work.
9. Work on projects with other programmers. Be the best programmer on some projects; be the worst on some others. When you’re the best, you get to test your abilities to lead a project, and to inspire others with your vision. When you’re the worst, you learn what the masters do, and you learn what they don’t like to do (because they make you do it for them).
10. When you meet a good program try to understand it inside out. Experiment with it as much as you can. What happens when you make a change? Ask as many questions as you can and try to find the answers.
11. Analyzing problems correctly helps to solve the problem correctly. But, good analysis is learnt only by practice. So, when you go somewhere try to see if you can develop a solution using programming.  Even if it is a small problem like your household budget, or your pocket money management.
12. You should know at least a half a dozen programming languages. this makes you aware of different programming practices used in in different programming languages. But, keep in mind that all the programming languages support different programming features like class abstraction, functional abstraction,  Syntactic abstraction, declarative specifications, coroutines, parallelisms, etc. Or it may be based on frameworks like, .NET, MVC, etc.

Well, I will finish here. But there are many other things that need to be considered while writing a good program. But, I guess programmers already know it. Happy Programming.

References:

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years – Peter Norvig <http://norvig.com/21-days.html&gt;

Published: 2001, Last Accessed : August 25, 2008 at 11:39 a.m. IST