As I have learned, coding standards are more than just making sure your code is correctly indented and your variables are well-defined. Coding standards are a set of well-defined rules and provide a standard style of coding that programmers must maintain. These standards are important in this field because, most times, other people will have to work on projects together, and without a standard style, it would make it very difficult for others to work on projects together. Especially when working in an organization, it would be a terrible practice to allow everyone to use their own style of coding because it would be very confusing when the time comes for people to review the code. Following coding standards improves readability, reduces complexity, and allows for maintainability by making it very simple for anyone to jump into any project.
A comparison that I use to better understand the importance of coding standards is with writing, punctuation, and grammar. When writing a resume, if your paper is filled with incorrect punctuation and, grammatical mistakes and doesn’t have all the information necessary, then it will make it difficult for employers to read and unintentionally demonstrates your lack of organization, attention to detail, and effort. These are not qualities that you would want an employer to view you as, which is why it is important to follow basic writing standards and structures of the papers you are writing.
Unfortunately I have not had the opportunity to work on a program in a group capacity yet, but I can understand the importance of maintaining the same style of coding throughout all assignments. Since I learn through repetition, these strict practices will definitely benefit me once I am in a job capacity, and I will be less likely to make mistakes that would make my code look messy and unorganized. Therefore, I can see the importance of a uniform appearance to your code, not only in reference to group projects, but also for future employers and projects that will be on your personal portfolio. It is important to maintain the code readability because no one would want to read an essay that has a lot of grammatical mistakes, missed indents in the beginning of paragraphs, and unstructured essays. I believe these standards are the same for employers and peers who want to review your code.
This first week of introduction to VScode and ESLint has been very surprising. I thought that my favorite IDE so far has been IntelliJ, but I think ESLint takes the cake. I love that there are so many options for plugins, and it just makes working on different WODs so much easier and more efficient. The addition of ESLint definitely makes debugging easier, and quickly identifying errors that don’t follow a basic coding standard has greatly improved many of my small technical errors that I usually make. In addition to VScode’s automatic assumptions of errors and possible fixes have really made it much easier than my previous classes, where I often had to use ChatGPT or Google to decipher the errors that were outputed into my console when a program would crash or be unable to read from a file, just to name a few examples. I definitely look forward to improving my debugging and style of coding, which will take continued practice and repetition to continue to conform with basic coding standards.