[Mxstermind]

What's One Programming Habit You Wish You Learned Earlier?

If you could go back and give your younger self one piece of programming advice...

What would it be?

Could be technical.

Could be career-related.

Could be about debugging.

Documentation.

Testing.

Reading code.

Architecture.

I'm always interested in lessons that only come with experience.

[TooBuck]

Committing myself to learning C. I never learned it in my adolescence. As a working adult, you have less time, and certainly less energy at the end of a day to learn.

I feel like other languages make me lazy. Most of the ones I've learned are object oriented languages. C makes you grind harder, and (in my opinion) grows your knowledge.

[Mxstermind]

Committing myself to learning C. I never learned it in my adolescence. As a working adult, you have less time, and certainly less energy at the end of a day to learn.

I feel like other languages make me lazy. Most of the ones I've learned are object oriented languages. C makes you grind harder, and (in my opinion) grows your knowledge.

Great feedback sir, thank you.

[BabaNugga]

Writing the thing that already works down before I touch it. Half my bugs were me 'improving' a script I did not understand anymore.

[Clifftonn]

Check every return value. recv(), malloc(), fork() — they all fail. Silent failures in infrastructure code are nightmares to debug. Second habit: write the test before the fix. If you can't reproduce it, you didn't fix it.

[code_g33k]

Committing myself to learning C. I never learned it in my adolescence. As a working adult, you have less time, and certainly less energy at the end of a day to learn.

I feel like other languages make me lazy. Most of the ones I've learned are object oriented languages. C makes you grind harder, and (in my opinion) grows your knowledge.

I definitely agree. I was 18 again I'd stop video games and talking on the phone a lot to learn C/C++.

[rodrigayz]

prob web dev in general cuz thats the fastest to market/get money from, i went thru c++ at first which made it very slow for me to make projects and the specific projects i needed it from was some automation project which could of been done with python, more than a decade ago.

but now i dont regret, even though i did in fact learnt to use python, javascript, and so on, AI agents nowaday make me x100 the work output and also the money coming in.

[Thalion]

I often wish I'd taken the time to become really good at JavaScript and CSS earlier. Now that they're pretty much cornerstones of web development, I'm a little bitter. :^)

[CapoCorleone]

Probably not skipping the boring stuff: reading the docs and checking return values before assuming it works.

I used to copy a snippet, tweak it until it looked right, then wonder why it exploded under load. Now I read the man page first, test the failure cases, and commit small steps even if the code is ugly. Feels slower at first, but it saves you from the 3am “why did this work on my machine” moment.