Formalities of Coding

09 Feb 2022

What is Coding Standards

If you are pursuing a career in software engineering, you have probably coded in more than one type of language. Once you have been coding for a bit you start to realize that although the languages in which you code may differ some things stay the same. Some examples could be having a space between functions or camel casing or any number of things that do not necessarily affect your coding results. These coding standards are more of a grammatical, quality of life, and common curtesy/ etiquette to the other people that may be reading your code or to yourself. Now in my course the coding standard that I will be using is something called eslint.

Rough Beginnings

My first experience with eslint to be honest was kind of annoying. Especially trying to get used to it with a new editor and coding language made it even more difficult. There were things that I would do out of habit from my experience with other languages that would not work here. One nice thing is that eslint often offers to adjust the changes for you. There are times where it does not do that, and you are struggling trying to interpret what the error prompt is trying to rely to you. Another thing is that eslint does seem to lag a little behind when compared to other grammar checking programs which does make things a little more unpleasant when you are in a rush. My final gripe with this but in general is when you finally get your code to work sometimes you just do not want to be bothered having to go back and fix things up.

Work That Pays Off

Although the troubles of using eslint for my coding standards are hard to learn in the beginning I still think it is worth all the trouble. One of the reasons for that is that I truly do think it helps you to learn that language better. In my case until recently I did not know why I would keep getting flagged for using let rather than const. When I started to think about it, I found a deeper understanding of knowing what kind of variable or function I am trying to use and the outcome I am trying to receive. Another reason is that helps me to read through and fix errors in my code a lot more efficiently. As we all know there is never a time where we just write code down and it works perfectly fine the first time. Also, we are not the only one who look at our code. Often, we have partners, group mates, reviewers who will have the pleasure or displeasure of going through our code. All in all coding standards in my humble opinion is a crucial skill or discipline to have if you want to be a good programmer.