Someone Else's Shoes

As the saying goes "walk a mile in someone else’s shoes" Refers to judgement of someone else without understanding their situation. But I want to use the idiom here to convey the importance of looking at your work from the perspective of someone who will have to maintain or change it later.

Consider the idea "Why should I document or write a clean program if i already know what it does?"

The necessity of documentation and clean code aren't as prominently in students' minds as it should be.

I recently worked on a project from an advanced data structures class that required two program's that used Prim's algorithm. Before this project I understood the general idea that clean code was important and that documentation was important but this project really drove the idea home.

To give it context: These programs were presented on informal educational websites.

They were written without much documentation, minimal use of functions and separation of concerns.

Armed only with a debugger and a cup of coffee, I slogged through giant blocks of code just to understand what the author was trying to do, which took the majority of the time for the entire project.

If a similar project were assigned in lower level classes, I bet it would help students realize just how important clean code and documentation really is.