Coding Standards

06 Feb 2019

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As a novice software developer, utilizing coding standards often seems to be over the top when one is struggling just to learn. However the farther along I get, the more merit I see in adhering strictly to a set of coding standards. Especially in larger, team projects following coding standards accomplishes a few goals. First, it improves readability. Second, it establishes a baseline to follow among multiple files and different programmers. Being that this is the first time I have worked with the version control system Git it seems also be important to keep a standard among multiple commits and repositories. Habits are hard to break, and following standards is also a good way to learn healthy habits without necessarily knowing the reasons behind them. Coding standards like using ‘let’ instead of ‘var’ is simple enough for a novice to understand. Once that programmer learns more they will understand the difference between using block-scope and function-scope and by this point the habit will already be in place. Other standards like disallowing irregular just makes sense from a readability perspective. Attempting to go through lines of code which don’t line up properly is a nightmare for debugging. Getting the green check mark is often a pain. It’s not always clear what the issue is when reading warning messages. However, IntelliJ and ESLint seem to be as clear or clearer as any IDE I’ve used in the past. It’s not totally clear how much I’ll enjoy using the coding standards in place for this class, however I am glad to learn them at the beginning of my journey with Javascript and not later on.