software development

It’s a bit frustrating when people hide behind the “Lazy Programmer” tag.

There is nothing good about bad “lazy” programming.

Discipline yourself in the small things, and it’ll help at 3am when you’re bleary-eyed and trying to work out whether that should be an “equals” or a “not equals” IF statement. Trust me, that’s from more than my fair share of stupidly late nights.

It’s such a simple thing to disable and enable a button on a simple dialog window like this one.

1. By default, disable the OK button (because it’s the one that moves you forward and you want the User to make a choice).

2. When a selection is made, enable the button.

3. OR, default to a selection (eg. “U. S. English” in this example) and the logic enables the button.

What’s the big deal?

It’s often the case that Software Developers, sometimes very very good ones, talk about adding polish later.

There is truth in this, but it’s also a bad thing when taken to the extreme.

IF you can’t spare 5 minutes to write the logic for disabling/enabling a button on a simple choice dialog window THEN you are not fulfilling your mighty destiny as a Software Developer ELSE you gain a little bit of experience for the next level (which no doubt has some cool power-ups).

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