Or, “How looking at bad code makes us realize we’re not bad coders.”

We’re pretty sure we’ve talked about The Daily WTF before, but today’s addition is pretty gawdawful. (The extra “w” makes it worse.)

Earlier today, we had a conversation with another geek about TDWTF and its implications for the trade. We here at Heathen have never been enaged in pure development, so we know our skills aren’t tip-top. We do, however, feel competent — and sites like that makes us feel even better.

Anyway, the conversation got us thinking about what makes a good developer, and how that works, and how you can tell if you suck or not, and this fell out of the dialog:

I’m leary of anyone who says “…. and therefore I’m a good programmer,” but I might cautiously suggest that anybody who, as I do, looks back over older code they’ve written and realizes it needs to be better and then fixes it is probably at least passable, and by this I mean “better than most based on what we see of the trade at dailywtf.” What kills most bad coders may be a simple sort of incuriosity about how things could be better. Like, spending days reinventing wheels, which seems to be a theme at DWTF. [OtherGeek]: Larry Wall says good programmers exhibit laziness, impatience, and hubris. Exactly. I’ve amused many clients by discussing the need to be “lazy enough”. [OtherGeek]: The key point being that lazy people have the sense to say “there has to be an easier way to do this”. Right. This sometimes leads to spending a day writing a routine to accomplish something programmatically that you could have done manually in an hour, but that’s ok.

Food for thought, anyway.