Building from the base up
10 Feb 2022
Makes Life Easier
In our early budding careers as computer scientists, we’ve all been bound to encounter those dreaded red and yellow error messages that give us so much strife but also a sense of sanity when we are able to identify where the error is occurring. This sanity can easily come from the result of practicing coding standards in our programming to help identify syntax errors and so much more. Before getting into the benefits, first let’s cover what coding standards even are. Coding standards are basically a set of rules and guidelines that dictate formatting, structuring and work environment capabilities when it comes to coding. It has become more familiar to us from using it constantly with the many various types of coding design. What’s nice about coding standards are flexible and can be configured in ways that suit the task at hand the best, how the programmers codes or even a combination of both, making doing standards available for everyone!
Programmer Friendly
While we may not love standardized testing, standardized coding had more of an appeal and can be a programmer’s best friend. The relationship between you and your buddy, coding standards, can start off a bit awkward with you two at first but with more experience you get the feel of it a lot more and start to recognize the benefits of it. With standards it assures that the code that is written follows a certain structure and set of rules meant to improve readability in your code and prevent bad practices in code while encouraging better ones. With the encouragement of good practices allows the program to be less convoluted and easier to understand for new programmers of the language trying to get a grasp.
Helps Achieve Greatness
Along with providing structure, catching errors and reducing complexity of the program with better practices, coding standards do wonders for collaboration. When something coding style is standardized this brings familiarity to other programmers when they are looking at someone else’s code and understand it knowledgeably. Coding guidelines like indentation, naming conventions and detailed commenting help boost readability and understanding which ultimately boosts the efficiency of the software and team developing it. This was probably one of the biggest benefits that coding standards offer because of how it’s enhanced collaboration and efficiency for the whole world and helped produce a lot of what we know today.
Source of first image.
Source for second image.