Quote:Original post by Samith
Bad code typically comes from students never being forced to think of the long term consequences of their style and design choices. Programming assignments don't typically grow beyond a few hundred lines of code, and they're typically done solo. Such code is never meant for reuse and typically usability isn't a student's concern. After four years of coding like that, students go into the industry and see million line projects being worked on by a dozen or more programmers and don't know what to do. Suddenly the code they write will likely be used for a very long time and by a lot of people. Its clarity and ease of use is a huge concern, and the student has never learned to program with those things in mind.

Software engineering classes are probably the best courses to take to try and cure the bad coding habits.

I agree completely with your first paragraph. I disagree completely with your second.

The cure must be structural; universities need to change the kinds of programming examples and assignments they use. Freshmen should be introduced to existing code bases that they will work with their entire college careers. Upperclassmen should be tasked with architecting subsystems and delegating tasks to teams of freshmen and sophomores led by select juniors. It'd be a radical departure and require much more cross-pollination of the individual years, but it'd better equip the students for real world software development.