There are a lot of good comments about pratice on here, it really does make all the difference.

You should worry less about "code jocks". Take their advice or comments for what it is. If they're hard to deal with in a thread, they're probably hard to deal with in real life also and really, who has time to worry about their social ineptitude?

The end result is, there are thousands of ways to approach programming tasks. A lot of things boil down to personal preferences. I for instance, hate reading code with tenary operators. Others, love them. Do I think they're right or wrong?.. actually, neither. It's personal preference though a lot of heated debates will be had on the topic.

If someone berates your code because you took 25 lines instead of 20 I would tend to just ignore them unless they have found an actual flaw in logic. Sometimes in the real world, we have to just get things done (and who really wants to listen to someone chest puffing about how complicated... err, elegant they managed to make a piece of code that should have been done in 10 minutes). Can you learn something from endless philosophical debates on how far to abstract things? Sure... but there is dimishing returns in getting sucked into constant 100% elegance. It's not realistic all the time as much as we'd like to pretend that it is. Some of my least elegant code that I'd be embarrased to share with anyone (that I wrote in the beginning of my career) has saved people weeks upon weeks worth of time, been used since it's inception over a decade ago and would have to be pried from the users cold dead fingers (and also works, has never broken thus has never been given time to go back and "clean up" which is always the story).

There's a great blog post by Joel Spolsky called the Duct Tape Programmer. It's a great read and IMO puts some of your fears into perspective.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/09/23.html

I'm not saying write crap code and ignore best practices, but take ranty programmers with a grain of salt.

There are a lot of good comments about practice on here, it really does make all the difference.

You should worry less about "code jocks" and take their advice or comments for what they are. If they're hard to deal with in a thread, they're probably hard to deal with in real life also ; and really, who has time to worry about their social ineptitude?

The end result is, there are thousands of ways to approach programming tasks. A lot of things boil down to personal preferences. I for instance, hate reading code with tenary operators. Others, love them. Do I think they're right or wrong?.. actually, neither. It's personal preference though a lot of heated debates will be had on the topic.

If someone berates your code because you took 25 lines instead of 20 I would tend to just ignore them unless they have found an actual flaw in logic. Sometimes in the real world, we have to just get things done (and who really wants to listen to someone chest puffing about how complicated... err, elegant they managed to make a piece of code that should have been done in 10 minutes). Can you learn something from endless philosophical debates on how far to abstract things? Sure... but there is dimishing returns in getting sucked into constant 100% elegance. It's not realistic all the time as much as we'd like to pretend that it is. Some of my least elegant code that I'd be embarrased to share with anyone (that I wrote in the beginning of my career) has saved people weeks upon weeks worth of time, been used since its inception over a decade ago and would have to be pried from the users' cold dead fingers (and also works, has never broken thus has never been given time to go back and "clean up" which is always the story).

There's a great blog post by Joel Spolsky called the Duct Tape Programmer. It's a great read and IMO puts some of your fears into perspective.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/09/23.html

I'm not saying write crap code and ignore best practices, but take ranty programmers with a grain of salt.