[dragonwriter]

> It will teach you bad practices, like abusing of dangerous programming constructs or data structures to optimized the code or just save some typing while writing the code (like one letter variable names, macros, etc), global variables and state in the program, not using common design patterns, not using OOP, not documenting the code and in general writing code that is difficult to maintain because it's not well engineered.

These are not “bad practices”. Many of them are bad in certain common contexts, but literally none of them are bad in throw-away code used in the course of root-cause-analysis of problems in other code basis, and most are useful in many parts of proof of concept code. In working on production systems, most of the volume of code I produce isn’t production code, and has a very different set of constraints than production code.

And given history on HN, whether “not using OOP” is ever a “bad practice” is probably a whole discussion of its own.

[alerighi]

And if the proof of concept does work, you take all the code that you written, throw it away and rewrite it? Probably not. I've seen too much "proof of concepts" go into production because they worked. Except when someone else had to actually maintain the thing and the person that wrote it leaved the company 1 year before.

There is not proof of concept code to me. Every line of code that I write professionally I write it to the higher standards. That doesn't mean over engineering it, but it means writing it in a way that is maintainable and understandable by others. I can compromise on functionality, of course in a proof of concept I implement only the things that I need, but not on code quality.

Even if I have to write a script that I know it will have to be used once and never again I will write it in a good way, you never know if you need it again, if a coworker does need to do a similar thing and you can just give to him as reference, or if you can take pieces to do other things.