Coding is a somewhat personal tool. Although the coding languages everyone uses are the same, everyone can have different ways of writing it. It’s kind of like personal outfits; although everyone wears clothing, everyone wears different clothes. However, if you watch a basketball game, for example, every team wears the same jersey. Why? Because they are a team; they need a way to recognize each other. Imagine if a basketball team wears different jerseys, it is hard for that team to organize and collaborate. Let’s get back to coding standards. Why do we need coding standards?
Just like the basketball team example I just gave, an organization needs a “standard ” to collaborate with each other. In the software engineering industry, coding standards are the standard we need to collaborate with each other. Without coding standards, everyone can write code in their all style, and everyone will have a hard time understanding each other’s code.
ESLint is a static code analysis tool for identifying problematic patterns found in JavaScript code. In simple terms, it is just a tool that checks code quality. I really like it; I find that getting the green checkmark is satisfying. Fixing the red squiggly lines is a really satisfying process for me. But the real question we should ask is, what is our impression of the coding standard for this class?
I find the coding standard a little bit annoying because I need to fix it before I can run my code. However, I do agree that coding standards make my code look clear and consistent. Like I mentioned previously, when we work with other classmates, the coding standard can be a really good bridge to understand each other. Furthermore, when we present our program, we can have unified code contributed by everyone instead of a messy code.
I personally don’t agree that coding standards can help you learn a programming language. The reason for that is because when people learn a new programming language, the most important thing is what they do and what the result is. Coding standards don’t help on both fronts. I am saying this not for everyone, but coding standards don’t seem to have a correlation with my learning process.
At a personal level, I don’t think coding standards matter that much; what matters much is if your code can execute successfully and how to improve it. However, at an organizational level, coding standards are very important. It matters because they determine whether your code can be understood by other people in the organization. In addition, as a software engineer, practicing to work in a group is especially important because bigger projects require an unbelievable number of people to work together.
By the way, the answer to the title is because it has too many bugs and the documentation is never up to “standard”!