Coding Standards
05 Sep 2019Inital Thoughts About Coding Standards
Coding standards is very important because it can become an issue like the Unix fork problem. Back in the 1980s Unix was the standard operating system that everyone ran. Unix was popular, but everyone started to create their own flavor of Unix, such as System V and BSD Unix which started creating compatibility issues, which is similar to our situation where we have many programmer writing in javascript or c, but the way people define variables, leave spaces makes it hard to read something or follow their frame of thinking. If we don’t set a standard, we could have the problem that phones had before smart phones become popular, where each phone company had their own set way of charging their phone, leading to 20 different connector world wide to charge various phone, which all have the single task of providing power to a phone or the screw driver standard, where there are many different heads including different types of Philips heads screw that look almost exactly the same, but have different screw driver to prevent slippage.
Importants of a Standard
POSIX was a standard that was created to ensure compatibility between the operating system. It set fore standards, such as definitions, system calls that were agree upon by all vendors. I like to look at this like our ESLint, it helps us build a standard that helps fellow programmer to easily follow and read code written, which can help debugging or collaboration as most great projects are build by a team. Some great project like Linux or even the very language we’re learning in this class JavaScript are build by a team of programmer, thus having a standard help makes code readable by other programmers. Without a standard, two different people can have two very different style of writing, leading to many incompatibility or frustration if they are working together.
Conclusion
I therefore find ESLint useful, just like all standards before like the TCP/IP model and POSIX, because it helps programmer conform to a set of coding standards, that help other software developer or programmer more easily understand and read other people’s work. It not painful getting the green check mart although the dictionary may cause issues as some of the spelling I use is shorten for a word, it may be better to follow ESLint and spell out the whole word.