The Most Important
If you had to ask me, what is the most important technique when it comes to coding? I would have to say coding standards would be up there as one of the most important techniques when it comes to coding. I cannot tell you how many times a professor has stressed the importance of following the coding standards. No matter how many different coding classes I have taken, or will take, there will always be one thing that comes in common with all of them, and that is the lesson of coding standards and how important it is to follow them.
Starting Out
Now at first, I won’t lie, I thought coding standards were one of those things where if I followed them, great, but if I didn’t it’s not the end of the world. I didn’t even really pay attention to all those little extra things that I had to do to make my code look good. But as I started taking more coding classes, and got into learning more languages, I realized how important coding standards really were.
A Little Story
Giving a little background for this story, me and my cousin when we both started college just so happened to want to study computer science, and I am about 1 year ahead of him. So with me being 1 year ahead, he would sometimes call me up or text me to get some help with his code. And the first time that I took a peek at his code, it was actually so hard for me to read his code to figure out what was going on. Indentations were all wrong, a lot of empty space, and naming conventions were all over the place among other things. I had such a hard time reading his code that I ended up writing the code over myself and making it so that I was following the coding standards. This event was one of the things that made me realize the importance of coding standards.
ESLint and JavaScript
Now after using ESLint for one week I can say that it has been a good experience so far. The things that I like about it is that it really is helping me to get over the bad habits that I have had coding and fixing the small little things that I didn’t even realize I was doing wrong this whole time. But at the same time, I can also find it kind of annoying that my entire code is all good, but ESLint is still showing an error to add a line at the end of the file. Those small little things that I didn’t really find important, are showing up as errors in ESLint.
Conclusion
In conclusion, coding standards in my opinion is the most important technique for anybody coding to learn. Even if it seems really annoying and tedious at first, there really will come a point when not following the coding standards will come back and make your life a lot harder. Especially when it comes to working in groups, or helping other people with their code, coding standards is a must for working in groups.