I have been an independent software consultant for the past several years. I feel that the most important aspect of programming is to meet the requirements of my customer in a timely fashion. Elegance in coding is lost upon the client or end user; they simply want the software to work.

Poorly written code has a tendency to haunt the writer, or worse yet, the person who takes over the project. I feel that all code should be written from the standpoint of maintenance by being consistent, having intelligent variable & function names, proper error checking with clear error messages, and liberal use of comments and whitespace.

Looking at my code:

[1] This is a fairly simple script written in the perl programming language. Perl is a strong language for string manipulation because of its regular expression and handy built-in functions like the "replace()" function that reverses the letters in a string. It is also useful from the standpoint of portability, i.e. this same script, with only minor modifications, will run on my Linux box.

[2] Note the comment section at the top that tells the script name, what the script does, and assumptions made when writing the code. I also add a "Change Log" depicting date, my initials, and description of the change.

[3] The script uses tab indentation where tabs are set to 4 spaces. I have run into code that uses tabs or spaces indifferently making the code difficult to follow in another editor. This script consistently uses only tabs for indentation.

[4] Variable names use a composite of a three letter identifier of what the expected type will be, in this case 'str' suggests that the variables will hold strings. Types are not as important in perl, but it can be handy to the programmer to know what the variable expects.

[5] Comments are used liberally throughout the code to describe what is going on in that block or line. Years down the road it will be much easier/faster to understand the English comments than the actual code. This is especially true in perl when using robust regular expressions.

[6] The variable $strReversedWord did not need to be defined; I could have simply printed the result rather than storing it in a variable. However, the variable is named such that it aids in clarification of what the code is doing. Also, any future changes to this script that require manipulation of the reversed word will be implemented more easily.