Why coding style matters

If you are adding these tools to a large or legacy code base it may be best to turn the tool on per file basis. Turning it on to check all files when first starting out may result in thousands of warnings or errors. Once the project has been running with style checkers for a while then it will be more reasonable to turn on the tool for the entire project. Save development time, improve product consistency and ship everywhere.

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Follow coryrylan. Cory Rylan Aug 30, - 3 minutes cleancode programming. Image credit unknown Why code styles? Getting Started When team or company decides code style decisions are made they should be well documented and easily accessible. Enforcing Styles and Tools Code styles are great to have but when developers have a million other things to worry about like deadlines and bug fixes we tend to get sloppy with code style.

There are many other tools for all kinds of languages such as Sass , Make sure the style configs for your style checkers and linters are easy to access.

Using these is highly recommended since the probability of finding bugs if any increases multifold. EditorConfig is a language independent tool that helps maintain consistent whitespace styles for multiple people working on the same project across various editors.

Most editors support EditorConfig either natively or through a plugin. Almost all widely used IDEs and text-editors support automatic code formatting upon typing. In addition to that, there are many language specific tools for automatically formatting code according to a particular style. Note that editors often support using these tools directly from the editing environment. Black , yapf. If your team needs guidance to create readable code, stick to a coding standard. If you don't, don't.

All that being said, I think most teams would benefit from agreeing on a standard way to name variables, functions and classes, position braces, and so on. If the team can't agree on something as simple as that, how can they expect to come together and make the really important decisions?

Plus, your team won't be made up of the same people forever -- people leave, new people are hired. The easier it is for new people to grok the codebase, the quicker they can contribute to the team without lowering the quality of the code. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.

Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. How important are code formatting guidelines? Asked 11 years, 2 months ago. Active 7 years, 11 months ago. Viewed 5k times. Improve this question. Tamara Wijsman 8, 14 14 gold badges 57 57 silver badges 94 94 bronze badges.

Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. I think you touched on the most important points: It's a guideline Readability If you want the code to adhere to the same formatting, like a paper to be in the same writing style, it'll need editing and revising. Improve this answer. Especially 2: Readability. Sometimes a specific bit of code can be made more readable by deviating from the guideline. Eclipse does that quite nicely. Markus this works until someone wants to use another IDE or editor.

I prefer doing it in a pre-commit hook to give more freedom to the developers. Fair point GustavKarlsson, in this way you centralize the formatting and create a single point of change in case the "standard" changes.

As a workaround with more effort involved you could always write an additional template for the new IDE. Another example is diving back into a project that was finished by another development team. Think about the process of constructing a building. All of these collaborations go smoothly, because everyone applies the same standards — if you work with great people, at least.

Great developers do exactly the same thing. There are, nevertheless, some basic practices you can take into account. Take care you indent where appropriate, add proper amounts of whitespace and continue on new lines to keep things readable. If you work with a team of programmers, consider creating a style guide that leans heavily on common code conventions. Codacy is the easiest way to get your entire team on the same page, style-wise.

With our automated code review platform, you and your team can focus on creating an incredible digital product while we take care of housekeeping. Codacy is incredibly helpful in maintaining clean code, as we automatically and continuously review all pull requests, commits and the entirety of the codebase.

Meanwhile, you have control over the standards you want us to follow, and how strict you want us to be when analyzing the code. Deploy clean, secure code by getting started with Codacy today — just sign up with your GitHub account. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Automatically identify issues through static code review analysis.