cargo cult coding practices
Laurent Bossavit explains the notion of "Cargo Cult" programming - the example being setting a temporary variable to null (i.e., one that is going out of scope)
You may object that the setting-to-null superstition is totally harmless. So is throwing salt over your shoulder. While this may be true of one particular superstition, I would be particularly concerned about a team which had many such habits, just like you wouldn't want to trust much of importance your batty old aunt who avoids stepping on cracks, stays home on Fridays, crosses herself on seeing a black cat, but always sends you candy for Christmas.
What superstitious coding practices does your group have?
Comments
null helps GC yes? no?
[john mcintosh] November 15, 2004 19:23:32.015
I once had a fellow phone me from Hong Kong who explained a performance problem they were having. Seems they at the end of each method, and in each "destroy" method for a class (used to to destroy instances), they would set all the variables to NULL. The best was of course iterating over thousands of array elements, setting them to NULL since they felt this was helping the GC find NULL (garbaged) variables faster. Once they stopped doing this why windows just snapped closed....
Empty Java constructor
[Jason Dufair] November 16, 2004 10:08:33.802
I'm on a team doing Java right now. I see a lot of empty Java constructors. Being a Smalltalker making a living doing Java, I figured they must be there for a reason. Come to find out an empty constructor just calls the super's constructor. As if it weren't there in the first place. Whee!