Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Do Coding Standards Make a Difference?
An anonymous reader writes "Every shop I've ever worked in has had a 'Coding Style' document that dictates things like camelCase vs underscored_names, placement of curly braces, tabs vs spaces, etc. As a result, I've lost hundreds of hours in code reviews because some pedant was more interested in picking nits over whitespace than actually reviewing my algorithms. Are there any documents or studies that show a net productivity gain for having these sorts of standards? If not, why do we have them? We live in the future, why don't our tools enforce these standards automagically?"
Programmer doesn't like the coding standards that someone else set, decided to whine about it on slashdot.
Yes, having consistent code makes a difference, it lets you make more assumptions when reading code. If you can't manage to even manage to follow a simple style guide, you're probably doing all kinds of other sloppy things that are unwanted in the code.
Man up and spend a little while getting used to it, and using it properly.
(I know, I know, it means you must be a PHP developer)