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Code Pet Peeves: What's Yours?

Welcome to Code Chatter, your go-to series for conversational coding insights. What makes this series of questions different from all the others? Well, truth be told, not much, but they're still thought-provoking and fun. Join us as we explore the coding world, one witty question at a time.

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

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Top comments (36)

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vapourisation profile image
Thomas Pegler

This is so silly but I really don't like the Javascript pattern of not using semi-colons and trying to remove as much punctuation/structure as possible. I get the desire for conciseness but not having reliable beginning and end-points in code bothers me. I'm saying that as a Python developer (sometimes I wish Python had more punctuation but at least whitespace is the delimiter)

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insidewhy profile image
insidewhy

I have a slight preference to leave semicolons out whenever possible. Minimalist. It doesn't really bother me either way.

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arndom profile image
Nabil Alamin

My biggest would have to be spacing of code blocks, seeing large lines of code all together with no breathing room is just awful and slows down the readability.

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kachidk profile image
Nwanguma Victor

For me its the opposite, putting new lines only when necessary helps to know if pieces of code are related.

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arndom profile image
Nabil Alamin

Yh, I agree, but, there are cases where a new line really makes it easier to read, even when they are related. Take this for instance:

non-space example

spaced example

I'd say the latter makes the block a bit clearer.

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kachidk profile image
Nwanguma Victor • Edited

Cleaner does not necessary mean readable. i.e there are one-liners that are cleaner but not readable.

In your example, It would be annoying If I was scrolling through the code and, at every new-line stop to try and contemplate if the code above and below is related or not.

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arndom profile image
Nabil Alamin

Yh, one liners can be tedious.

The example I gave is about readability, the nesting also helps you to understand that's it's part of the same context, collapsing that block could also help you along.

At the end of the day I think it's just up to what your team agree is the pattern to follow

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jamesowens profile image
James Owens

If you're separating blocks of code that are related with new lines it could be an indication that your blocks could be extracting into separate methods.

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arndom profile image
Nabil Alamin

Definitely agree, this example is not the end and be all. In that case I was going by the rule of only abstracting when there is a repetition of more than 3. It's all opinionated though

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khairunnisaas profile image
Khairunnisaas

i agree for that

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jonrandy profile image
Jon Randy 🎖️

Spaces being used for indentation instead of tabs.
Tabs, not spaces

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michaeltaylor profile image
Michael R. Taylor

Yes, this one! And to go along with it, at least for me: using tabs for alignment. 😠

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ranggakd profile image
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)
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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
)
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khairunnisaas profile image
Khairunnisaas

bottom one is much better for me

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alteredoxide profile image
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.

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ranggakd profile image
Retiago Drago

sometimes the former saves more space 😭

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

I don't know if it's a pet peeve, but premature abstraction/DSL-ification grinds my gears, i.e. violating the "rule of three"

Rule of three is a code refactoring rule of thumb to decide when similar pieces of code should be refactored to avoid duplication. It states that two instances of similar code do not require refactoring, but when similar code is used three times, it should be extracted into a new procedure. The rule was popularised by Martin Fowler in Refactoring and attributed to Don Roberts.

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xanozoid profile image
XANOZOID

No comments

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manchicken profile image
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.

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mikeatupside profile image
Mike Lowe • Edited

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 😭

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nicolus profile image
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.

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ksolomon profile image
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…

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nicolus profile image
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 😉

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ksolomon profile image
Keith Solomon

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

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wraith profile image
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.

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sattineez profile image
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 😅

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kurealnum profile image
Oscar

I have come to really like statically typed languages. Dynamically typed languages are fine, but I can't deny that they get on my nerves a little bit.

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pxlmastrxd profile image
Pxlmastr
function curlybracesshouldbelikethis() {

}

function notthis()
{

}
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peterwitham profile image
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.

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cgarofalo profile image
Christina Garofalo

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