Coding standards are sightly pointless in programming. Typically, standards are put in place to assure that a level of quality is achieved. This makes sense when applied to certain places like a restaurant or in schools. In a kitchen, a high level of cleanliness is desired to provide customers with safe and edible food. In schools, a standard pushes teachers to educate students with the standard curriculum so the students learn progressively. However, standards in coding do not make sense. Making sure that a space is added before an open-curly-bracket does not affect the way the compiler compiles the code. The standard just adds more things to check while writing code.
I’ve had a rough time using IntelliJ and ESLint and setting it up on my machine. The main reason I had a tough time setting it up was that the videos covering the install were done on a machine running macOS. Also, some user interfaces had been updated since the making of the videos. After jumping through all these hoops, just to enforce standards on the written code, I still ended up running into issues regarding ESLint to check the code quality on new projects. When I am finally able to get everything to work, so much time is wasted at the end of the project to make use I get the green checkmark from ESLint. There were times I almost did not finish a project in the time allocated since I had to make sure that my code was up to the standard.
I do understand that coding standards make the readability of the code by another human. The standards also help format code so that debugging is a little easier. It also solidifies good practice when writing code especially while learning a language for the first time. It is also satisfying to see the green checkmark from ESLint when the program follows the standard. However, I do not think these benefits outweigh the challenges presented with implementing these standards. A code that doesn’t follow the nitty-gritty details of a coding standard can still be easily understood by other humans. Also, many IDEs come with debugging tools that can troubleshoot any errors that occur.
Coding standards have their perks to a new programmer, but in all, it just adds more things that they need to learn about a language. It also doesn’t help that there are many coding standards that can apply to a single language. This brings up the question of which standards should be followed. I do have some mixed feelings about these standards, but there is a Japanese word that can sum it up. The word is めんどくさい, spelled mendokusai and pronounced Men-doku-s-eye, which means troublesome. The word has a connotation of ‘even though it is bothersome I will still do it,’ which is exactly how I feel about coding standards.