5 Excuses Bad Programmers Make

What the hell? those are very good reasons if proven with data. The troublesome excuses are more like:

1) "This is how the framework/library/API we use does things."

2) "I have seen this done in another technology."

3) "This seems to work."

4) "I thought you wanted me to do it this way."

and the best one:

5) "There are other ways?"

People who know about alternatives are better than the one-track minds, just by virtue of having choice. If they're able to argue for their choice and compare the options even better.

The author sounds bitter to me. Perhaps he has a new, fresh-faced and enthusiastic junior programmer on the team and feels threatened?

The problem is, good architects make the same claims, only with proof and arguments to back them. So this depends on you being able to tell the good architects from the bad ones at first.. which kinda defeats the purpose.

Sounds like a personal incident. I wouldn't agree that these are generic statements made by any aspring newbie. As ComputerGuru said, good architects prove their points. Maybe this "kid" is trying to get more formal in his communication and broad in his thinking. For all you know, he was trying to impress the author :)

This is an awful quality article. Not worthy of Hacker News.

Those are excuses good programmers make, or at least decent programmers.

Bad programmers make excuses like: - Copy and paste got it working. - I'll worry about error handling after I get it working.

“This will put us in a great position to make changes in the future.”

Programming with future requirements in mind is worthless, but re-factoring to make your code more reusable/flexible is not.

Clearly the trend is towards the 1-list. Or maybe a zero list?

Hey, link spam title; there were no excuses I can use. :-)