A Coding Ideal To Strive For
22 Sep 2022
In the programming community, I think the idea of coding standards is a good one. Having code written in a consistent and reliable format increases readability and understanding of said code. However, I feel as though sometimes coding standards reduce efficiency using complicated coding formats without a program to check the format. This leads to lots of time wasted checking the code for coding standard errors as opposed to writing code. While this may seem like a big criticism, I think the existence of ESLint integration with IntelliJ along with other code checkers makes coding standards an ideal all programmers should do their best to strive for.
After spending time with IntelliJ and ESLint, my initial hesitation about coding standards started to dissipate as I found ESLint very convenient as a code checking tool. While ESLint does take a bit of overhead to get running, after that, the program works in the background without much problem at all. Instead of having to take time to manually fix small errors, ESLint has an option that fixes those problems for you. This combined with a well written error message makes fixing ESLint errors easier than you might expect. Despite this, I personally find many issues with errors that the program will throw. I like having lots of empty lines in my program while ESLint does not like that very much. ESLint also throws errors for unused variables which causes many red lines when writing code. While these errors are quite the nuisance, I still think that ESLint is a good tool for checking code especially when combined with a good IDE like IntelliJ.
Ideally, it would be great if everyone could write code in the same way so that everyone could be able to read it the same however, that is not how the world works. Many people learn to code in different ways and are taught different methods of writing code. Coding standards and programs like ESLint exist to help code bases be standardized so the code is readable to as many people as possible. While people, me included, might not like certain aspects of the specific formats given, it is undeniable that coding standards help when coding in a team environment.