Meeting the Standards
08 Feb 2022Why Coding Standards?
Although very tedious at times, I believe coding standards are very necessary and can often times improve your code overall. Within all languages, there are certain rules and guidelines to follow, which I believe transfer directly over to programming languages. Even though it is possible to portray meaning by just stringing words together to get a point across, that does not necessarily form a sentence and not everyone will be able to understand. I believe this applies directly to programming in that coding standards help to keep your code neat, readable, and maintainable. It keeps code consistent in terms of thigns like spacing and indents so it is easier to determine what is actually happening. Which in turn, makes it significantly easier for others to understand your code and most importantly, easier for you to add to or fix it in the future.
First Impressions on ESLint
My initial impression of ESLint was that it was confusing to set up as I had spent a lot of time fiddling with it, trying to get it to function correctly in my first few attempts. This led to my practice WODs not meeting the ESLint requirements and being formatted pretty randomly as ESLint wasn’t implemented properly. After getting the hang of what files and settings are needed, I found that it is pretty simple to get the green check mark in my small sample size of simple javascript code. I feel that it is definetly useful and helps me correct silly mistakes that I would have not otherwise seen. The fixes have been very easy thus far as ESLint seems to fix most errors on its own when the error is clicked, given that the code is, for the most part, correct. Although frustrating at first, I’m liking ESLint because it keeps my code neat and is very straightforward on what mistakes I am making.
My Takeaways
In general, coding standards are very important for software engineers. One of the major upsides that I believe comes from coding standards is the universality it brings to your code. It brings programmers closer to the goal of writing code that any developer can understand easily. This allows for collaboration and improvement of code while also allowing you as the programmer to ask for help with ease. I also believe that, for beginners, it can greatly assist you in learning a programming language or a new IDE as it will point out both small and large errors for you, consistently, until you’ve learned the correct way. Coding standards should be looked at as more of a guide and a tool that only improves the quality of the code you output rather than a hassle. Overall, coding standards are very important for software engineering as they hold you, the programmer, to a standard that keeps your work neat and allows for collaboration between developers.