What Makes a Good Programmer?

[nedo]

What makes a good programmer? It’s an interesting question to ask yourself. It makes you reflect on the craft of software development. It is also a good question to ask your colleagues. It can trigger some interesting discussions on how you work together. Here are five skills I think are crucial to have in order to be a good programmer.

1. PROBLEM DECOMPOSITION

Programming is about solving problems. But before you write any code, you need to be clear on how to solve the problem. One skill good programmers have is the ability to break the problem down in smaller and smaller parts, until each part can be easily solved. But it is not enough simply to find a way to solve the problem. A good programmer finds a way to model the problem in such a way that the resulting program is easy to reason about, easy to implement and easy to test.

Some of the most complicated programs I have worked on were complicated in part because the implementation did not fit the problem very well. This led to code that was hard to understand. When the problem is well modeled, I agree with Bernie Cosell (interviewed in the excellent Coders at Work):

“…there are very few inherently hard programs. If you are looking at a piece of code and it looks very hard – if you can’t understand what this thing is supposed to be doing – that’s almost always an indication that it was poorly thought through. At that point you don’t roll up your sleeves and try to fix the code; you take a step back and think it through again. When you’ve thought it through enough, you’ll find out that it’s easy“.

2. SCENARIO ANALYSIS

Good developers have the ability to consider many different scenarios for the program. This applies both to the logic in the program, and to the internal and external events that can occur. To consider the different paths in the logic, they ask questions like: What happens if this argument is null? What if none of these conditions are true? Is this method thread-safe? To discover what types of events the software needs to handle, they will ask questions like: What if this queue becomes full? What if there is no response to this request? What if the other server restarts while this server is restarting?

The good programmers ask themselves: How can this break? In other words, they have the ability to think like testers. In contrast, inexperienced programmers mostly only consider the “happy path” – the normal flow of control when everything goes as expected (which it does most of the time). But of course, the unexpected inevitably happens, and the program needs to be able to cope with that.

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