Coding Standards are Valuable!
13 Feb 2020
Why Bother?
As I was going through the tutorials on how to install ESLint and configure the IntelliJ preferences to use that standard, I thought to myself, how tedious! I definitely spent hours getting the hang of using the console and getting the ESLint to actually work. I then thought, why must we constantly go through the procedure of saving the three files into our project directories and installing the ESLint libraries? Isn’t it okay to type our code the way that we are inclined to do? Do we need all our formatting to look that particular way? It then occurred to me that this is the same procedure we had to go through with installing Checkstyle while coding in Java in our 211 class. Undoubtedly, there is a particular reason why our professors are mandating that we install these utilities, and it is to benefit ourselves later on in the future as programmers.
Usefulness of Coding Standards
Even though it could be a pain to constantly configure the environment settings to accept coding standards, tools like ESLint and Checkstyle are essential not only in personal projects but also in collaborative work as well. Coding standards can save everyone much more time such that in a collaborative project, other programmers will know exactly what and where to look when solving a problem, thereby spending less time getting used to formatting that is different throughout. Having a uniform style of code will maximize other programmers’ abilitiy to understand what your intentions are. Not only that, these tools are our guidelines for improving our code, keeping a close eye on bugs that could cause runtime errors or slow the program down. They are like the parents of programming, watching over us, and ensuring that our code is written most concisely and properly.
It Isn’t as Bad as it Seems
Upon further tinkering with ESLint, the environment set-up started to become second nature to me. As I was getting used to this procedure, I started to enjoy the aspect of reaching that green checkmark at completion and surely, it can be satisfying knowing that I’ve met all the code standards, especially for a language that I’ve just started to learn. Ultimately, this tool is a great way for Javascript beginners and experienced programmers alike to hone their coding abilities. If this were essay writing, ESLint would be the grammar and spellcheck to formatting our papers. I believe that through enough conditioning, we will eventually be able to write flawless code with little or no help from tools like ESLint.