Coding standards are as much a necessity to learning a programming language as they are a hassle, when first starting. For many, I am sure, they just are. Many fledgling student programmers do not reflect upon why the specific standards are being enforced, just that they need to correct their form, or grammar, or adjust the amount of spaces, just because that is the way it is. In most of my previous programming oriented classes, we were often told to code a certain way or in a certain style and not conforming would earn you less or no points, and for no other justification we students would follow the instructions, lest our grades suffer. While this serves the purpose of getting an entire class to code the ‘correct’ way, it lacks the justification and reasoning of why we do what we do.
Upon further reflection, the conclusion I reached is that learning to code is like learning to write any other language. There are grammatical and stylistic rules that make the whose process easier for all involved, those reading the paper/code and those writing it. One can write an essay without formatting, following grammatical rules, etc and still end up with something that, once it has been slogged through, still carries whatever point the author was attempting to make, in the same vein a program can be written without adhering to standards and may even run successfully, but both cases make it much more of a gamble and many times more difficult for the author to accomplish their given task. By learning and sticking to the rulesets that are coding standards, a programmer learns, from the get go, a standardized and legible way to write in their language. To rephrase, using good code standards from the start lets a programmer learn good habits and form when writing code.
To relate this back to the current semester, in our class, we recently started programming in the IntelliJ environment. It seems like a solid development environment, with many similar features to others I’ve used, like Eclipse or Netbeans. Though it does seem to have many more easily configured options, of which the plugin for Javascript coding standards, ESLint has been useful for catching my poor coding habits, for the language. When everything in the code written is just right, it will give a green checkmark, the penultimate signal for well formatted and ‘grammatically’ correct code. At first, it seemed to be very picky about all manner of seemingly minor issues (a missing space here, an extra carriage return there), but those are easy enough to correct and I find myself not making such extraneous typos as I acclimate to the environment. By practicing the somewhat strict code standards I feel that it is easy, natural even, to type new code without making the same errors I used to, and maybe even write better code, if not cleaner code.