Code Pet Peeves: What's Yours?

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What's your secret 'code pet peeve' that, while not critical, drives you crazy?

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Comments

[Jake Lundberg]

I have 3 that really get to me:

1. inconsistent code formatting. i’m fine adopting different patterns or standards, but that pattern should be consistent throughout the codebase.

2. when someone says “we’ll circle back and fix this later”…in my experience…no we won’t. unless this is a prototype and the team understands that this code will be thrown away, let’s do it correctly now.

3. duplicate code. it may be easier for you in the moment to copy a chunk of code to get something working, but it causes so much more pain later. invest a little time now rather having to pay interest on that time later.

[Pxlmastr]

function curlybracesshouldbelikethis() {

}

function notthis()
{

}

[Amar Gupta]

👏😁

[Drew Knab]

Exceptions-as-control-flow, few things get me upset faster.

[Kaamkiya]

No comments, and when (in Python), not all of the import statements are at the top.

[Keith Solomon]

It’s code-ish, but I ran into this doing a review with one of our juniors today. She was working on the mobile side of a site, and had the hamburger menu on the left…that’s not a problem. The problem is, the menu opened from the right. It’s so minor as to be pointless, but it drives me crazy to see that…

[Nicolas Bailly]

Well to be fair if the spec she was given didn't specify what the hamburger button was supposed to do, she could have made it randomly open at the top/bottom/left/right and it would have been just as correct 😉

[Keith Solomon]

She wasn’t give a spec for it, and I didn’t say anything about it…I suffered in silence… 😂

[Mike Stemle]

My pet peeve is folks having too strong of an opinion about syntax.

• Spaces or tabs? I’m bored.
• Semicolons or not? Yawn.

I’m also rather annoyed by the over-emphasis on OOP as though it is the only correct paradigm.

Finally, I don’t like folks who behave like one language is better than another. They’re tools, not political positions.

[Tai Kedzierski]

Long, long functions. More than 2 levels of loop nesting. More than 2 levels of conditionals nesting.

Not splitting long functions is like writing an email without paragraphs.

🪓

[Bernd Wechner]

Line length limit standards predicated on screens narrower than the narrowest screens we have today (not moved with the times). Aka PEP8.

[Neil B]

Upper-case SQL keywords. It looks like someone's crazy uncle sent out another email forward and the illegibility gives me a headache.

[Peter Witham]

For me, it's over optimizing code to the point that whilst short and elegant, it is not readable at a glance for those that might not live in the code base every day.

[Sattineez_SSC]

Well, I guess mine it's why some languages start counting with 1, when the rest starts with 0 ( elements of lists for exemple) , why do they want to be different of the rest and don't start with the 0 😅

[Christina Garofalo]

Using long array in PHP. The sea of parenthesis () is so hard to read.

[Mike Lowe]

Not strictly code but I tend to alphabetise things like environment variables in config files, YAML, JSON param files for CloudFormation, that sort of thing. It pains my heart when someone comes along and just throws new variables/params in in any old order 😭

[Nicolas Bailly]

Oooh, you would love working with me : I tend to rearrange variable declaration blocks to order them by line length so it looks nice.

[Retiago Drago]

Cannot be consistent with either this

def add(a, b, c):
    return a + b + c

add(a_very_long_variable_a,
    a_very_long_variable_b,
    a_very_long_variable_c)

or this

def add(a, b, c):
    return a + b + c

add(
    a_very_long_variable_a,
    a_very_long_variable_b,
    a_very_long_variable_c
)

[Khairunnisaas]

bottom one is much better for me

[AlteredOxide]

Yes. The first one irks me, especially because that first argument is rarely perfectly aligned with your chosen indentation (2, 3 or 4 spaces), which leads to needlessly tedious manual spaces or deletions before following arguments—depending, ofc, on your linter.

[Retiago Drago]

sometimes the former saves more space 😭