12 (Really) Controversial Programming Opinions

A few days ago, Yannis Rizos posted 20 controversial programming opinions on the Programmers Community Blog. Judging by the comments on the blog, and on reddit and Hacker News, none of these opinions are considered all that controversial by the programming community at large. The problem stems from the fact that the opinions posted were selected from among the top-voted answers to Jon Skeet’s question What’s your most controversial programming opinion?, originally asked on Stack Overflow on January 2, 2009. People seem to have voted for answers they strongly agreed with, making those top answers some of the least controversial opinions you could gather.

I decided to take a different approach. What follows are some of the opinions that I found near the middle or at the end of the list. I tried to pick only answers where the author made an attempt at supporting their opinion, but as you can see some of these opinions were downvoted more heavily than they were upvoted by the Stack Overflow community. (I'll add that my own "controversial" opinion is that Jon's question is perhaps the best argument we have that these types of opinion polls simply do not work on Stack Overflow.)

1. Two lines of code is too many. (+20/-32) by Jay Bazuzi

If a method has a second line of code, it is a code smell. Refactor.

2. If it's not native, it's not really programming (+5/-15) by Mason Wheeler

By definition, a program is an entity that is run by the computer. It talks directly to the CPU and the OS. Code that does not talk directly to the CPU and the OS, but is instead run by some other program that does talk directly to the CPU and the OS, is not a program; it's a script. Read more

3. The "While" construct should be removed from all programming languages. (+6/-14) by seanyboy

You can easily replicate While using "Repeat" and a boolean flag, and I just don't believe that it's useful to have the two structures. In fact, I think that having both "Repeat...Until" and "While..EndWhile" in a language confuses new programmers. Read more

4. Copy/Pasting is not an antipattern, it fact it helps with not making more bugs (+4/-5) by serg

My rule of thumb - typing only something that cannot be copy/pasted. If creating similar method, class, or file - copy existing one and change what's needed. (I am not talking about duplicating a code that should have been put into a single method). Read more

5. Developing on .NET is not programming. Its just stitching together other people's code. (+7/-5) by Gerard

Having come from a coding background where you were required to know the hardware, and where this is still a vital requirements in my industry, I view high level languages as simply assembling someone else's work. Nothing essentially wrong with this, but is it 'programming'? Read more

6. The use of try/catch exception handling is worse than the use of simple return codes and associated common messaging structures to ferry useful error messages. (+11/-3) by Einstein

Littering code with try/catch blocks is not a solution.

Just passing exceptions up the stack hoping whats above you will do the right thing or generate an informative error is not a solution. Read more

7. Test Constantly (+15/-7) by PJ Davis

You have to write tests, and you have to write them FIRST. Writing tests changes the way you write your code. It makes you think about what you want it to actually do before you just jump in and write something that does everything except what you want it to do. Read more

8. Object Oriented Programming is absolutely the worst thing that's ever happened to the field of software engineering. (+34/-14) by Breton

The primary problem with OOP is the total lack of a rigorous definition that everyone can agree on. This easily leads to implementations that have logical holes in them, or language like Java that adhere to this bizarre religious dogma about what OOP means, while forcing the programmer into doing all these contortions and "design patterns" just to work around the limitations of a particular OOP system. Read more

9. C (or C++) should be the first programming language (+24/-5) by hansen j

The first language should NOT be the easy one, it should be one that sets up the student's mind and prepare it for serious computer science.
C is perfect for that, it forces students to think about memory and all the low level stuff, and at the same time they can learn how to structure their code (it has functions!)

C++ has the added advantage that it really sucks :) thus the students will understand why people had to come up with Java and C#.

10. Classes should fit on the screen. (+22/-7) by Jay Bazuzi

If you have to use the scroll bar to see all of your class, your class is too big.

Code folding and miniature fonts are cheating.

11. Making invisible characters syntactically significant in python was a bad idea (+43/-5) by Paul Wicks

It's distracting, causes lots of subtle bugs for novices and, in my opinion, wasn't really needed. About the only code I've ever seen that didn't voluntarily follow some sort of decent formatting guide was from first-year CS students. And even if code doesn't follow "nice" standards, there are plenty of tools out there to coerce it into a more pleasing shape.

12. Singletons are not evil (+42/-7) by Steve

There is a place for singletons in the real world, and methods to get around them (i.e. monostate pattern) are simply singletons in disguise. For instance, a Logger is a perfect candidate for a singleton. Additionally, so is a message pump. My current app uses distributed computing, and different objects need to be able to send appropriate messages. There should only be one message pump, and everyone should be able to access it. The alternative is passing an object to my message pump everywhere it might be needed and hoping that a new developer doesn't new one up without thinking and wonder why his messages are going nowhere. The uniqueness of the singleton is the most important part, not its availability. The singleton has its place in the world.