I was thinking the other day about coding standards, and what’s considered good coding practice. Let’s consider a handful of examples:

neatly laid-out code (indentation, line length, etc)

informative variable names

inline documentation/comments

When we work in coding teams we tend to hammer this into people. Most software projects have a “house style” of some sort, [...]

Everyone’s heard of pair programming, right? It’s one of the best-known practices of Extreme Programming, and basically it involves having two people work on every programming task, providing feedback and encouraging higher quality code.
Some people think — not to mince words here — that it’s a load of crap. They’re entitled to their [...]

A few years ago I discovered a tool called webchat which allowed you to script interactions with a website. You wrote things like:

GET http://www.perl.com
EXPECT OK && /perl/
GET not_there.html
EXPECT ERROR
BACK
BACK

and it would go fetch the page, see that it contained [...]