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Does Coding Style Matter?

Posted by Soulskill on from the obfuscate-half-and-document-the-other-half dept.

theodp writes "Over at Smashing Magazine, Nicholas C. Zakas makes the case for Why Coding Style Matters. 'Coding style guides are an important part of writing code as a professional,' Zakas concludes. 'Whether you're writing JavaScript or CSS or any other language, deciding how your code should look is an important part of overall code quality. If you don't already have a style guide for your team or project, it's worth the time to start one.' So, how are coding style guidelines working (or not) in your world?"

1 of 479 comments (clear)

  1. Re:It's easy with an IDE by Dr_Barnowl · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Having a consistent style means that you don't end up in the situation we are, where we have several patches that are probably a days work to merge with the main line, not because our patches are large, but because some bonehead decided it would be good to run an automated code reformatter on his source tree.

    This not only reformatted everything to a style that no-one else on the project uses, but re-sorted all the fields and methods in the source files affected. This made everyone elses copy of the source conflict violently with essentially every change made in the reformatted files, giving everyone else the headache of re-implementing their patches.

    Peoples edits continue to make the format of these files a mess because they are indented in a way that's inconsistent with the source.

    Alas, we can't undo these patches because the bonehead is the lead developer. But catering to prima-donnas means more work for everyone else.