I'm a newbie to scripting, are there any bad habits or good habits I should be building?

[EmbatTheHybrid (Embat)]

The only few tips I know to help you are

Good Habits

• Use local before the declaration of a variable/function. It’s not required but a lot of developers use it so it’s honestly best to use it as well

• Name your variables/function the same as their purpose. Say you have a function that is supposed to add 2 numbers together. It’s best to call it Add2Nums() for example instead of anything unrelated to it, it can help having to comment code that can be confusing to understand since right names can act as comments of their own

• Comment code that can be hard to understand and can’t all be explained by proper naming. Make sure it properly details what something does.

• Don’t Repeat Yourself. What I mean by this is if you ever find yourself in a situation where code has to be repeated, such as make multiple scripts with the same purpose, don’t. Find a way to only have to use that code once but can be used by multiple things. For duplicate code in the same script it’s simple, just make a function and reference that function instead, but for other things you’ll have to get creative

Bad Habits

• Using the 2nd parameter for Instance.new(). The 2nd parameter is used to assign the Instance a parent, it’s slow to use than just declaring the parent at the end.

PSA: Don't use Instance.new() with parent argument

I’ve discovered a pretty bad performance issue in one of top games that has to do with Instance.new and wanted to write about this, since this is not obvious unless you know the system inside out. Tthere are several ways to create a ROBLOX object in Lua: local obj = Instance.new(‘type’); fill obj fields local obj = Instance.new(‘type’, parent); fill obj fields local obj = util.Create(‘type’, { field1 = value1, … }) If you care at all about performance, please only use the first option - I wi…

• Focusing way too much on optimizations. Usually some programmers tend to find as many ways to optimize something when in reality those optimizations are so small that they won’t do any difference and can just harm readability, focus on the minor optimizations that are common use

• Overcomplicating. Making your code simpler to do a specific task can often be more pleasing to look at/improves readability and can help when debugging. If you don’t know how to make something using simpler methods, you can try to research.

That’s currently all the habits I have in my head that could be of use to you