5. Good Programs Are: Effective, Robust, Efficient and Maintainable

... as observed by Nick Gonzalez. A good program is effective: it solves the problem it is supposed to solve. A good program must not crash when it receives bad inputs from users: it is robust. Good programs are efficient: it does the job it is suppposed to do quickly. Since the requirements for a program may change over time, a good program should be maintainable, so it can be modified easily when requirements do change. A program can only be maintainable, if its code is written in a clear manner.

Any damn fool can write code that a computer can understand, the trick is to write code that humans can understand. (Martin Fowler in After the Program Runs)

Code is often "unnecessarily complicated, convoluted, disorganized, and stitched together with disdain", as observed in a post by Santiago L. Valdarrama who recommends using comments when necessary, only to explain things that can't be made clear enough, but rather make your code reveal its intention through the use of better names, proper structure, and correct spacing and indentation.