Coding Standards: More Than Just a Style
26 Sep 2024When I first heard about coding standards, I immediately thought about the most superficial details and issues, such as how much indentation is needed or the placement of brackets. Even so, coding standards are much more than just a stylistic format guide of a program. They provide a framework for consistent, maintainable, and easy-to-understand code, and as such, its role in enhancing software quality is not mentioned enough.
Instead of labeling such guidelines as merely ‘trivial’, it is important to know that coding standards are vital in the production of reliable AND scalable software. Not just to make code look neat, but to make it easily understood, thus minimizing the risk of bugs and maximizing efficiency of collaboration with others. As such, I recognize coding standards as a quality and skill that I should look to master if I wish to improve my future software development endeavors.
Looking Beyond:
While specifics of indentation or bracket placement for the most part may seem as simple as personal preferences, its consistency is more important than it makes it out to be. When a team of collaborators follow the same standards, or at least something similar, everyone is able to read and understand each other’s thought processes and intentions more clearly. These standards thus unify all contributors into working together for developing, testing, and debugging code. Without such a standard, group project’s would quickly fall into a chaotic mess of each individual’s own styles, halting workflow and diminishing both the team’s effectiveness and efficiency.
Similarly, coding standards help to navigate through projects even when it comes to just how you want to approach it. In most languages, there can be a multitude of directions you may choose to take in order to tackle any project, however, coding standards help to narrow down these options and avoid any inefficient patterns or common syntax mistakes at all. This brings me to ESLint, which I have been utilizing recently within my ICS 314 course.
ESLint: The Nitpicker Nobody Wanted…
ESLint does not just enforce stylistic rules, but also functional ones. This includes warnings when variables are declared and not utilized, or maybe when a function is missing a return statement. In any case, these may seem like small issues, but after deep thinking, these errors thrown by the tool can prevent common errors and on top of that, teach us developers to think harder about the structure of the code. This can only be positive, as the standards it holds us to will be less like restrictions, and rather protective measures to ensure the quality of our code is where we want it to be.
In my experience, I found the past week with ESLint to have its highs and lows. At the beginning, I was frustrated since whenever I felt I was making some progress, I was greeted with yet another error that seems to have popped out of nowhere, asking to fix something which I thought was not worth the trouble. However, after making it through that process multiple times, I found myself writing code that initially triggered fewer errors than when I had started, showing just how much ESLint was shaping me to write good quality code from the start.
Hassle or Helpful?
Both. Initially, dealing with all the errors feels tedious, and is, and can fester some irritable feelings in the process of coding. Yet, the process is quite useful in my experience in the long term. It shapes your discipline and forces you to think more critically about your code, which I feel will pay off in future coding projects. Think of it as the effort to clean up code being an investment, where the return on investment is a much higher quality code and smoother development processes.