Instill Good Habits Early
23 Sep 2019What Are Coding Standards?
A raw definition for coding standards can be defined as a set of guidelines, best practices, programming styles and conventions that developers adhere to when writing source code for a project. Most people think of this typically as the amount of spaces one must indent to on a new line or where you put your curly-braces. While this is true, there are much more to coding standards than that. As you will see in this reading, following coding standards will completely improve the quality of your code.
Why Are Coding Standards Important?
I believe that some coding standards can actually help you learn a programming language. This is because some programming languages work really well having a certain type of flow to it. When you don’t know the language, just adhering to your own personal coding standards will make it difficult to understand what is going on in your code and make it more difficult to read.
How It Has Affected Me
After my first week of using ESLint with IntellijJ, I found it very reassuring that I already write code in a good enough standard that it was easy for me to get a green check mark meaning that my code follows the ESLint coding standard. I started with good coding habits when I first learned my first language C because I knew that if I struggled to read my own code, then someone else would struggle even more. I found it very easy to adapt to the ESLint coding style because it was already very similar to how I was writing my code before. I wonder if I didn’t have these good coding habits instilled early if I would have struggled a lot more trying to adhere to the ESLint coding standard.