I was poking about today and happend across this article about what advice to give a new programmer. Overall, I agree with it, except for the parts about a coding standard, Singletons, and comments.
Singletons are more than just global variables. Even if you code them to just be wrappers around global variables, you've gained some encapsulation, and that will help you when you need to track changes to something global - you put a trace statement into the set function for the value, and you'll see where it's getting changed.
A single coding standard is important - the article shows a small function with 2 different styles and states that it's easy to work out the code flow and intent. Well, sure it is, when you've got only 5 lines of code. Where a coding standard shines is in functions that are longer, with more complex interactions. I had the misfortune to be looking at some code recently that as far as I can tell had been developed by at least 3 different people, each with a different indentation setting and brace style. I found differences in one function (about 30 lines) in intertwined sections of the code. Following the logic was difficult because I had to keep going back to the start of each clause to see if I was exiting a layer. If you can't get your development team to agree on a standard, enforce one with an automated tool - you will be thankful later.
And finally, comments. The article does recommend using comments for the WHY and not the WHAT, and rightly ridicules commenting each change in the top of the file, but if you don't comment on the why of each non-obvoius path in the code, the developers that come after will miss it.
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