Program coding can be either good code or bad code by depending on the code quality and coding standards followed. Developers need to be conscious about generating good codes rather than bad ones. For any application developed, it is important for the developers to have quality coding. The coding standard and practices will get updated as the year’s pass and developers need to upgrade their codes as per the requirements.

The good code is readable and understandable code that is covered by automated tests. Also, these codes are neither complicated and do well what is intended to do. When considering bad code, they are complicated and can’t be easily readable. Also, bad codes are expensive and created without considering future updates. In short, we can distinguish bad and good code as, codes that are developed by beginners and experts in the software industry respectively. The difference is, an expert developer will follow the best and latest industry practices during the development process. But, as a student/fresher developer, the primary focus will be to find the desired result, rather than concentrating on the code. Also, in other words, we can define bad code as, codes that are created in a hurry without considering how further developments can be done.

Both good code and bad code can be compiled without any error notifications. The good code is more effective than bad code and it will provide better performance. An easily avoidable part of every coding is comments. The compiler or interpreter will never read comments and doesn’t show any errors in them. But, this makes the code longer, and difficult to read and understand. 

Further development, debugging, and modification can be done easily if the code is good code. But, this will be difficult if the developer using bad coding practices. Because the new generation developers will feel it difficult to understand the outdated codes and new updations on this code will become a failure.

Good Code v/s Bad Code

• Good code has proper indentations and includes meaningful comments. While bad code has improper indentations and comments that state the obvious.
• Good code has proper organization using namespaces. While bad code doesn’t.
• Good code contains classes and methods that perform one job/thing. Also, good code will contain methods having less than 10 lines and no more than two parameters.
• Good code uses better naming conventions proper exceptions.
• Most of the good code uses object-oriented code while bad code uses spaghetti code.
• Good code is reliable, loosely coupled, and has high cohesion.