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• Reading Code Over the Telephone

  In my youth I once attended a lecture given by Brian Kernighan on the subject of code quality, which was very influential on my attitudes towards writing legible code. One of the things that Kernighan recommended was to endeavour write code that was so Read More... Posted Friday, May 16, 2008 7:00 AM by Eric Lippert | 24 Comments Filed under: VBScript, C#, Lambda Expressions, Code Quality

• Translating intentions and mechanisms

  Before I get into today's blogging, a quick note about my recent post on How To Not Get A Question Answered . That was certainly not intended to be fishing for compliments or chiding people for never acknowledging help ten years ago; that said, I appreciate Read More... Posted Tuesday, March 25, 2008 10:26 AM by Eric Lippert | 12 Comments Filed under: C#, Lambda Expressions, Code Quality

• Bad Names

  Over the past year and a half of working on the C# compiler we’ve refactored a lot of crufty old code. But a surprising number of the “refactorings” have actually simply been renaming a structure, class, or method to something more sensible. The compiler Read More... Posted Tuesday, June 12, 2007 11:59 AM by Eric Lippert | 9 Comments Filed under: C#, Code Quality

• Should we produce warnings for unused/uninitialized internal fields?

  You may have noticed as you've been developing C# applications that if you have an internal field of an internal type which you never use, we give you a warning about it. In fact, there are a number of warnings that we give for such fields, depending Read More... Posted Tuesday, May 15, 2007 10:34 AM by Eric Lippert | 39 Comments Filed under: C#, Code Quality

• Write-only variables considered harmful? Or beneficial?

  I haven't forgotten that I promised to describe one more place where we insert an explicit conversion automatically. But before that, a quick digression. Reader Phil Haack has written some good tips for writing clear code and quotes an old post of mine Read More... Posted Monday, April 23, 2007 7:00 AM by Eric Lippert | 13 Comments Filed under: C#, Code Quality

• Error messages: diagnostic is preferable to prescriptive

  The new LINQ features are going to create new failure modes for the compiler, so we're going to need to create some new error messages. The compiler development team got together the other day to discuss what makes an error message good or bad. I thought Read More... Posted Friday, July 07, 2006 11:04 AM by Eric Lippert | 31 Comments Filed under: C#, Code Quality, English Usage

• Bad Recursion Revisited

  We have internal email lists for questions about programming languages. Here's one that came across recently that I thought illustrated a good point about language design. An interview candidate gave the following awful implementation of the factorial Read More... Posted Thursday, April 28, 2005 12:12 PM by Eric Lippert | 20 Comments Filed under: JScript, VBScript, Scripting, C#, Code Quality, Recursion