5 Tips to Write Code Faster In Any Programming Language
Every programming-related task consists of several generic phases: understanding, planning, writing code, testing/debugging, and finalizing. Programmers spend most of their tasks’ time on coding and debugging because they typically do planning when they write code. Therefore, every programmer tries to boost their coding speed via various sorts of productivity tips. For example, some programmers use code editor extensions that auto-generate some frequently used code snippets.
Those productivity tips teach you how to speed up things that you repetitively do. Writing code is a dynamic job in most cases. For example, you don’t write the same code that you wrote yesterday and again today — if you do, you probably need to check design pattern principles. However, we need to learn some facts that affect our coding speed directly if we need to boost the coding speed. A programmer may complete a particular coding activity in one hour. Meanwhile, another programmer may complete the same work in just five minutes by maintaining the same quality.
In this story, I will explain some tips that can boost your coding speed by maintaining the quality of your work. You can indeed practice these tips with any programming language, software framework, or library to do coding jobs faster than you did before.
Apply Metaprogramming If Possible
We typically use complex data types to store a collection of data. For example, if we need to store and process details about a person, we don’t transfer and process separate variables such as name, age, country, etc. Instead, we create one class, key-value object, or structure according to the programming language we use. Assume that you need to generate a SQL query with an object called Person. Some programmers may tend to access each underlying variable by key name, as shown below.
person.name, person.age, person.country
If you need to add another SQL field, you have to modify your SQL query generator function. When the number of fields increases, you may take a lot of time to type field names explicitly. If you treat the person object as data and extract all information (fields and values) you need to generate the SQL query during program runtime, you can quickly write highly dynamic code fast. This technique is known as metaprogramming, and most of popular languages offer it via reflection APIs.
Before using a particular structure’s field names explicitly, try to think in a metaprogramming way. Metaprogramming is a great time saver when you work with data serialization and conversion. However, overusing metaprogramming can reduce the readability of code and also can slow down your program. Therefore, use it carefully.
Write Ready-To-Commit Code with the First Attempt
Most programmers tend to implement a quick solution first. After that, they often do refactoring to make the code clean. Besides, they may do quick refactoring to enhance the reusability of the code. Meanwhile, some programmers always strive to implement clean and reusable code with their first attempt.
However, if you start writing reusable and ready-to-commit code by staying patient, you’ll save a lot of time that you may spend on refactoring. This action is a bit difficult to practice because we always wish to see something working while we are working on tasks. Also, we may implement quick implementations first to verify the technical feasibility.
However, if you practice implementing reusable, clean, and ready-to-commit code with the first attempt, you can do every coding task faster by maintaining the quality of your work.
Learn the Latest Language Features and Use Them Carefully
Every popular programming language introduces new toolchain features, language improvements, and standard API updates with new versions. Also, programming languages may deprecate existing features. Programming languages’ changes often include features that programmers can use to speed up the coding process. For example, it’s time-consuming to work with large multiline string manipulation in JavaScript with normal string syntax (with single quotes or double quotes) because you need to add many string concatenation operators. But you can work with any complex string manipulations with the new ES6 template literals.
Likewise, your favorite programming language’s new features may include features that you can use to speed up your coding speed. You can learn these new features by reading the programming language’s version history, blog posts, and open-source code repositories. Also, your favorite programming language’s standard library can already have a piece of code that you tried to implement from scratch.
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However, you need to select the new language features carefully. First, you need to check whether your production environment supports the feature that you wish to use. After that, you need to make sure that the new feature doesn’t affect the readability of your code.