Coding Standards, Do We Need It?
10 Feb 2022Starting with Standards
In coding, something that I believe should be at least mentioned to everyone is camelCase. A naming convention was made to form multiple words as one word by capitalizing the first letter of the word(s) after the first word. Although camelCase seems like a trivial part of creating a functional program, it improves legibility a lot and in a way is a part of the coding standard. Like many things in life, there is uniformity to make it easier to communicate and understand each other’s ideas. An example I’ll use will be the picture of the MLA format for writing essays. Essays come in many different styles and formats, but MLA is the format used the most. Comparing the coding standard to the MLA format, we follow this style to make it easy to read our ideas in a structured way. Although we are free to talk about or code what we want, when it comes time to collaborate or release our work into the world, having it structured just makes it easy for everyone.
My experience with having a coding standard started when I took my first class in computer science. Although it wasn’t the priority, he did encourage nice clean looking code. Probably because he’s the one that has to grade our code. From then on my college professors started to implement more coding standards and now in ICS 314, it is taking it to another level. Although I’m aware of most of the coding standards there are a few errors within ESLint that I never thought of being an error, and so I know I have much more to learn.
Experience with Others
In my first computer science class at UH Manoa, as a final project, we had to work in a group to create a game using java. Aside from having to create functional code, to make it easier to share we were highly encouraged to make the code easy to read. Although it wasn’t a required part of the final project it helped that I had prior coding knowledge, but it didn’t make a massive difference because we were more concerned about making something that could run. Since then I’ve learned and experienced a lot more about sharing code and can personally say it’s worth the time and effort since it helps prevent more stress and headache down the road. It’s interesting to see the code I wrote in the past, but at the same time, it’s cool to see the progress made from then to now. Though I still have a lot more to learn I’m excited for what the future has for me.
Source: Code (Repo to my part of the final project)