Are You Struggling With Coding Style?
07 Feb 2019
What is Coding Standards
You must have heard about coding standards. Let’s talk about Coding Standards in this project. Before I start on the topic, do you have any idea of what coding standards is and what it does? According to Wikipedia, coding standards are a set of guidelines for a specific programming language that recommend programming style, practices, and methods for each aspect of a program written in that language. Like it said the above, coding standards plays an important key role in computer language. Despite the importance of coding standards, there are cons and pros of it. Let’s assume that you have only two choices (your own style coding and coding standards) to code your computer language. What if you must choose either one of the choices in computer language, what would it be? We will see my personal answer for that question later.
Inconsistent Code Causes You Pain
In my case, I was one of those who don’t recognize the importance of coding standards and know why I must use the style. In addition to this, I used to get obsessed with running projects I worked on because I was newbie for the computer languages, so I only focused on running codes even though I knew how important using coding standards is. In my opinion at that time, using coding standards gave me so much pain and caused stress. Besides, I was uncomfortable using coding standards because it made me think that I get controlled by someone who made the coding rule. Maybe you might think about it in the same way as I did. Even if you had the same thought as I did, if you realized the thought was wrong, you would know my answer for the question I asked at the beginning.
Why Coding Standards Is Essential
The reason why using coding standards should be the answer is because the word ‘coding standards’ literally means the coding standards style is supposed be standard to everyone in computer language. In other words, you are not the only one using the coding style, also everyone doing computer language in the world. You might still think that following the rule coding standards takes away your freedom to express your coding style. This might be true to argue about keeping up with your own coding style. However, what if these too much expression causes you disadvantages? For example, suppose that you get to work on a team project with your teammates. What do you think that sticking to your own coding style affects to your project? You and your teammates will struggle to read and understand codes in different types of coding style. If we suppose that we put ourselves in the same situation but with bigger size of teammates and project, we can not even estimate how long it would take to read and understand the codes. In my real events, I grouped with 4 people for a group project when I work on C programming language, and we spent few hours explaining about what this means and what this does to teammates. Therefore, using coding standards is a good way to fix those problems and end up improving your computer language skills.
Start with a Good IDE
If you still dislike coding standards or hesitate to change your style to standards, you should try with EsLint with an IDE Intellij, which is helpful fixing problems like the above.