My 12th grade English teacher once told me and my classmates how he is a messy person yet he has a system on where things are. If one thing were to be moved from his mess, he would not know where that specific thing is since his mind is already trained on finding that specific item in that specific area. It is his mess of course but in a way, it was his organized system of finding stuff around his workplace. In a way, coding is like a messy bunch of numbers and letters on a screen but in a systematic way where every character and number is there for a reason.
When lines of code are seen by a person with no coding knowledge, they may see it as a bunch of characters and numbers with no idea of what it’s supposed to do or how it runs. When regular coders see it, we have a general idea of what they are trying to do but to do that, we would need coding standards. Even though it can be seen as a mess, we need a system or a middle ground on how the characters and numbers should be organized in our code. Coding standards in a way are like learning the grammar and structure of different languages like English. Without grammar or structure, no one’s going to know what one peer is saying to the other. So what could help us refine our “grammar” in coding? That would be with the help of a tool called an Integrated Development Environment or IDE for short.
One example of an IDE is a program called IntelliJ. IntelliJ helps with code formatting and allows software developers to make their code a bit easier to read. My thoughts on IntelliJ are at first tiring but then useful in the long run. It’s tiring at first mainly because the program gives formatting errors over small repeated things like “newline needed at end of code” and “this is never reassigned, change it to a const instead”. But over time as we do those habits with repetition, it gets to where IntelliJ warns of those specific errors and it allows us to clean up our code on habit without a program telling us to do so. It can be carried over to other programming languages so it is much easier for other programmers/software developers to look at it with some minor tweaks here and there depending on the language/IDE.
I believe that coding standards can help me learn a programming language. Being able to learn the coding standards and how to format your code can allow other programmers to traverse through your code or “mess of characters and numbers” at a much more efficient rate.