Standing with ESLint
11 Feb 2020
“A different language is a different vision of life.” - Federico Fellini
Coding standards, what’s the deal with that? Well coding standards were agreed and made to read code efficiently, by using this standard it allows coders to code homgenously. This allows multiple people to work on one piece of work all at once. If for whatever reason that everyone on a project just got up and switched to a completely different part of a coding project, then they should be able to pick up on what is going on after a couple of minutes. Coding standards is synonymous to speaking the same dialect of a language. Since there are already so many coding languages, speaking in the same dialect would be necessary to understand each other. For example, if I took random people from different countries to speak some language, there might be some difficulty understanding one another due to pronunciation, enunciation, or use of colloquialism. Had they all taken the same language class, they would just speak properly, but going along with my analogy, they would also understand one another better.
As It Pertains to Coding Class
Throughout all my coding classes I have had to follow some sort of coding standard, I did not think too deeply into it by looking at it retrospectively, not only did it improve the quality of code, it improved the legibility of code. Looking back at my old work, even though I was more of an amature then, I am still able to read what I was doing and there is some homogenity going on between then and now.
Groups For Now
I feel that reinforcing a coding class under one coding standard will allow classmates to unite under it. For example, one of my recent Workout of the Day (WOD), I was struggling on the first function where I had to identify whether or not a certain string had appeared in any of the lines of a passed array with strings. However, I had a teammate who had zoomed passed though it and I asked for some of his help, he read his code to me and I understood it even though all he was telling me was “some, lists, function, list…” I was able to understand it for what it was because the entire class codes under one coding standard. I have also helped people in the same way, just by listing the names of things in hopes that they will understand and get it. Most times they do, but sometimes I need to explain it in a couple more words than that. Therefore, coding standards definitely have a place in a learning environment.
Groups For the Future
Utilizing coding standards will definitely be useful within the coming years for the rest of my classes and future career. I will gain even more importance as I work in bigger groups or bigger projects. Homogenous coding will be required so I do not need to call my teammates to explain to me what is going on with their code. However, I just may be able to catch on to what they were aiming for if I was a long time coworker. But not only does it allow for legibility of code, it allows the team to function more efficiently. For example, if a project was mainly done in Javascript then capitalization will definitely matter, some members might capitalize the first initial of a multi-worded variable, which gives room for error in the rest of the group who might need that code because it is capitalized in a peculiar manner. It is definitely one of the more subtle errors, but an error that can take up a lot of unnecessary time. Some people might be skeptical of my claims, so I will refer to a real life scenario where this had mattered. In recent years the video game “Among Us” had risen to popularity, however, for almost a year they had not updated the game despite active developers still on the project. This is because that the original developer had poor archietectural design when it came to coding. This had delayed the project’s intention for updates, and allowed multiple issues to be unresolved for quite a time. They even had a hacker problem going on for a while. But essentially, Among Us has died down within the past couple of months because people can only play the same thing for so many times before getting bored. Therefore, a group should abide by one coding standard, to improve legibility of code, efficiency of the group, and the longevity of code.
Naming Conventions
I really enjoy naming conventions in books or stories, so in independent projects, I would like to made some absurd naming conventions. This would only be if I knew that no one else was going to look at my work. The idea is that I make varibles and methods names go after a theme, for example in heritance I would name the parent class Zeus and name all the classes beneath that one something like Hercules. I do this to make coding a little more fun, but in reality I might just end up naming variables something like “please_Work” if I am really struggling, which I hope I don’t succumb to. But hopefully, I just have a bunch of inside jokes that I can laugh at by myself.