My Own Standards
20 Sep 2017
Good looks
As software engineers, we will all eventually write billions upon billions of lines of code. And most likely we will have to share our source code to get input as well as collaborating with different people on various projects. So would it be wise for your code to look good? But before answering that what is good looking code? It isn’t like code has any type of features that will make it look good or bad, it’s just a bunch of letters and numbers. Well that is absolutely right, but what good looking good is how easy it is for a person looking at the source code to easily read and understand what is going on. Good looking code lets a person other then yourself to look at it quickly a figure out what is going on (of course this only applies other coders, good luck explaining it to non-coders). So in essence following a coding standard would be ideal. It may not be ideal as you thought.
My Way
Following a set of rules on coding standards may make it efficient in coding, but from my experience it didn’t really help. using ESLint with IntelliJ lowered my effciency in terms of coding. Writing code using ESLint was a lot slower than writing coding using without it. It did make my code look neat and tidy but I don’t think my way of coding looked drastically different. My code before were still readable and understandable. So for me, using coding standards were a hindrance. But it’s not that coding standards were bad, it was that I had my own set rules that I followed as my coding standards. My coding standards conflicted with some of ESLints such as that I like to put my swiggely brackets to indicate functions, loops, etc. underneath the name rather then the sides. It makes it easier to see which line of code are within each scope. This was my way of doing things. However there were standards in ESLint that I want to incorporate into my style such as making an extra empty line as the end of the code. This made it easier to see the actual last line of the code.
My Own Standards
So in all, following coding standards is good, just as long as it is something that you want to do. If a set of rules don’t sit right with you than make your own. Just as long as your code is readable and easy to understand, it doesn’t matter what standards you have just as long as you make it your own.