Throughout all the computer science classes that I have experienced so far, there have been few occasions where coding standards or neatness were brought up. I do vaguely remember it being mentioned in ICS 111 but it has never been made a priority after that. I think its because the earlier level courses were just focused on teaching us the fundamentals of coding and coding standards aren’t completely necessary when just trying to give us a basic fundamental understanding of how to code. As a result, I didn’t put much thought into making my code look neat.
ICS 314 is taking a different approach and is trying to instill a strong habit of using coding standards whenever we program. After my first week of using ESLint with IntelliJ, I have mixed feelings about the strict rules enforced. Initially I found the coding standards to be annoying because I didn’t see the point in making such miniscule changes if the output of my program would remain the same. However, after using them more often, I’m starting to see some benefits to the coding standards. It definitely helps to make my code a lot more readable and its nice to look at code that is formatted evenly throughout its entirety. This makes debugging a lot less of a hassle and I could see it helping with bigger projects where different areas of the program will have to be rechecked often. Having neat code will also be very beneficial to group projects where teammates will have to work on the same program together. If everyone codes using the standards, everyone will be able to easily read through code written by others.
Overall, even thought using coding standards can take some extra time the few extra minutes spent will be well worth it. In the end, all the little details will add up to make the code as polished as possible.