The 7 Deadly Sins of Programming

What are the 7 deadly sins of programming? John Purcell, Creator of CaveOfProgramming.com Updated Dec 2, 2017 · Upvoted By Les Howe, Software professor for 40 years, and Hasib Al Muhammad, IQ participant ’13, ’14, ’15, ACM-ICPC World Finalist 2016 · 6 author has 5,9 HackerRank 9.3 and 3,999 answer viewers 1. Using spaces instead of tabs. You should always, always use tabs, not spaces. 2. Using tabs instead of spaces. You should always, always use spaces, not tabs. 3. Not using auto-formatting. Forget all that tabs/spaces rubbish, what's wrong with you — auto-format your code and then preenow how to look at your weird ideas about brackets and spaces. 4. Using IDEs, which have features such as auto-formatting and nicely-coloured buttons. All code should be written in vi or Emacs, thus ensuring the purity of the programming experience. 5. Not using IDEs. No-one wants to pay for all the time it's going to take you to type things that you could have done at the click of a button, or scroll up and down using some ridiculous key combination invoked using LISP. 6. Failing to learn C and C++. It's really important to learn the two absolute essential languages. You think Java is just as good? Fine, write me a real-time control system for racing cars in Java and I'll believe you. 7. Learning C or C++ when you could be using something modern like Java instead. Admit it — all your schedules involving C or C++ overrun by five years. And even then the software turns out to have critical flaws that Java would not even have allowed you to create. 8. Overrunning the end of an array.

A screenshot of a satirical list titled “What are the 7 deadly sins of programming?” despite containing eight contradictory rules. Each point mocks extreme programming dogmatism, especially arguments about tabs versus spaces, IDEs versus text editors, and C/C++ versus Java. The joke is used as a reaction to absurdly opinionated programming advice and language wars.

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