Hehe. I am your bloop/cockup expert. You ever need advice on how to make them, come to me. I would gain an instant Doctorate in them if such were available.
My copy/paste bloops are the stuff of legends. I am slowly getting better at avoiding them. Here is how:
- When I have to code a fresh function, I move away from the computer and think about what I have to do. It helps when these thought periods correspond with bathtime, but it is not actually essential that my thought periods happen in the bath. Instead, the sofa will do, so I have: bath loll; sofa loll. Most problems I solve are solved during these times.
I comment nearly everything. I have learned from grim and bitter experience this salutary fact: a code snippet whose meaning is so screamingly obvious now that a comment is clearly a ludicrous waste of time, will take me three hours to decipher in 2 months time. Look at squalou's code for magnificent examples of commenting.
When coding an EA, include a description of the trading methodology in an comment somewhere - or at least a link to the post that inspired you to code it. I have not done this in the past. When someone contacts me and asks, "Hi Steve. Can you please add this tiny tweak to xxx EA?", it takes me 2 minutes to add the tweak. After I have spend all day working out what the EA actually does.
When adding code to a function, ask yourself whether this code should be in its own separate function. A classic example of this is how I have recently moved tp/sl calculations in my shell code, from the functions such as LookForTradingOpportunities and HasBuyFilled etc into their own individual functions. Instead of slavishly recreating the same code several times, I can now simply add a call to the CalculateTakeProfit() etc functions. From here, CalculateTakeProfit() can hold several different tp calc methods, and return the one that is actually required.
