{"id":191,"date":"2004-10-11T08:36:38","date_gmt":"2004-10-11T14:36:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/?p=191"},"modified":"2004-10-11T08:36:38","modified_gmt":"2004-10-11T14:36:38","slug":"coding-standards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/191","title":{"rendered":"Coding Standards"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’ve all been caught up in the religious war of coding standards. Whether it’s ‘tab vs spaces’ or ‘3 spaces vs 4 spaces’ or ‘curly brace on same line as if clause or curly brace on line below if clause’, these arguments can take up a significant amount of time on a project. Ken Arnold has an interesting post where he recommends that coding standards be integrated into the language specification, and enforced by the compiler<\/a>. His reasons:<\/p>\n

1. There’s no real productivity difference between one coding style and another.<\/p>\n

2. There’s real productivity lost in setting up pretty printers, re-formatting code manually, and arguing about the better style.<\/p>\n

3. If programmers have latitude, they’ll use it. (See perl<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

So, take away the freedom of programmers to format their code in a non standard manner. Make coding style part of the compiler–not as a warning though (as Bruce Eckel says “when you discover you can ignore them [warnings], you do”<\/a>)–actually have the compiler error out if the formatting is incorrect.<\/p>\n

Sure, I’d wail along with the rest of the coding community, for a while. But then I’d adjust, especially if the tools were there. And I’d probably be more productive. Talk about tough love.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’ve all been caught up in the religious war of coding standards. Whether it’s ‘tab vs spaces’ or ‘3 spaces vs 4 spaces’ or ‘curly brace on same line as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-programming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}