Pair Programming Coding Horror

Yesterday I had the pleasant experience of pair programming to "learn the code" from a lead developer. I use the term "pleasant" loosely. It's pretty hard when you're the intern and you see the things your "experienced mentor" are wrong. This becomes especialy trying when you try to call best practices to his attention and he uses excuses to excuse personal coding laziness such as:

• "the customer wants it this way" (chances are he doesn't. the customer usually wants something that works, and doesn't care about the implementation detaills.)


• "this works" (yeah, but how robust is it? secure? maintainable? modifiable?)


• "I don't know what this does and I don't wanna deal with it." (when you're the lead developer on a project, this is a bad mentality.)

At one point I wanted to scream out "DON'T REPEAT YOURSELF!" and "DON'T LIVE WITH BROKEN WINDOWS!", but my good sense got the best of me. Still, I felt like William Shakespeare learning to write from John Grisham. At points I wanted to yell out "You knave! You scoundrel!"