Re:modularity/incremental rollout/unit tests/itera (Score 0)

The worst programmer habit I know of is copy-and-paste coding instead of using subroutines. You can tell people not to do it, but some always will. Those people should be bid farewell -- you can't afford their overhead

This drives me absolutely crazy. I understand it's tempting to copy-n-paste, considering the deadlines that many programmers are on(I've done it on occasion), but in the long run code readability and the ability to _easily_ modify code suffers.

For example, we have a binary file format for our configuration files. In order to check to see if a particular data type is a byte array, you have to mask off some bits and do a bitwise or. What if we change the format for byte array? Well, you have to go through umpteen config readers and change all the copy-n-pasting that has been done. Just a few weeks ago, I blew up and said that I wouldn't touch any new code that hadn't used the functions that I had written.