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When You Actually Have to Write New Code

Jan 22, 2009

Writing good code makes life easier, says Bioinformatics Zen's Michael Barton. In this post, he lays out several tips for doing so. First, be descriptive, especially when choosing variable and method names. Being too concise could pose problems when you or someone else is trying to read or update your code in the future. Second, be dry. "DRY means don't repeat yourself," he writes. Finally, check out reputable books and open source libraries, which often will have solid example code to learn from.

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