Standardized Preparation

20 Sep 2018

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Coding standards are an important aspect of software engineering. As Professor Johnson says, it’s one of the most important aspects. Having a standard to follow and emulate is vital to improving one’s knowledge of a language. This week of using ESLint with IntelliJ has been quite interesting and has solidified my previous assumption that coding standards are incredibly useful and necessary. Getting the green checkmark hasn’t been much of an issue for me. However, when I have completed the program and see that I have the green checkmark at the end, I feel a strong sense of accomplishment, knowing that I did a good job. In a class room setting, being held to a coding standard helps students learn proper technique, formatting, and syntax for their code. The fact that there are multiple solutions for a problem is one of the reasons why coding standards are necessary. Without them, it makes it even more difficult to read another person’s code and try to help them trouble shoot their issues. This also has the effect of making grading easier on the TA’s, especially if someone had close to a correct solution but messed something up syntactically. In a workplace setting, it is incredibly important to have a standardized way code is written. Throughout a company, projects are usually not handled solo. Thus, the importance of having a standard, company-wide way of coding style. Without this standard, teams would have trouble working together and understanding the code of their peers. Time is incredibly precious for companies so sloppy code that doesn’t follow the company standards has no place there. It’s important that we as students practice coding to a given standard because that is an industry expectation. The more practice we have now while students the better it will be for us later and the smoother of a transition we will have into the working world. I’m glad that we’re being given some exposure to the expectations our future employers will have for us.