Coding Standards
When I think of the words “coding standards”, I vividly recall the time that I was standing in the middle of two veteran programmers going back and forth about where the starting curly brace should be. At that time, I barely had a grip on C functions and pointers, so I felt as though they were debating something trivial. In my mind, when it came down to coding standards versus functionality, functionality always seemed orders of magnitude more important. However, as I became more familiar with C++ and Python and started to look through standard library source code, I finally realized why coding standards were just as important as functionality. When you’re trying to finish a homework assignment with only 10 minutes left until your deadline and you forget to add a space before your parantheses, then yes, coding standards are a nuisance, a hinderance even. But when you’re a new hire at a company with thousands upon thousands of lines of code to go through, if programmers before you stuck to their coding standards, the consistent coding can ease you into the work and make everything seem less overwhelming.
As beginner programmers, we often only look at the small picture. Because we are still learning, we just want our code to function properly. We write functioning but messy code for school assignments that we know won’t be carried on to bigger projects and tell ourselves that we’ll be neater in the future. But as the saying goes “old habits die hard,” and many times, we end up with inconsistent code even though we’re more experienced.
While I’m still guilty of carrying bad habits, I whole-heartedly agree now that coding standards are just as important as functionality.