Standards of Programming
13 Feb 2025
Coding Standards
Throughout my college education I have taken a number of programming classes. Through quite a few of them, I have been exposed to the idea of “coding standards”, and I have had to accommodate such standards in my code before. Software developers are no doubt familiar with this concept, but to those who are not, coding standards are essentially a uniformed style that your written code must adhere to. This style can vary quite a lot, from company to company, or even from language to language. In many (arguably all) programming languages, there are many coding conventions that programmers generally stick to when writing in said language, which in itself could be considered a “coding standard”, one shared culturally throughout all developers.
Purposes and Thoughts
From the perspective of a tech company, perhaps the main purpose behind the existence of coding standards is that it allows for code to be uniformed. This is especially important when it comes to dealing with enormous code bases with teams of dozens or even hundreds of engineers working on it. To the individual developer, having to follow a coding standard can seem a bit tedious and annoying, I know that I relate. But when it comes to dealing with huge enterprise projects, not having a uniformed coding standard would make working on it far, far more annoying. The coding standard allows the entire code to look the same and be more easily readable, making work on it far easier. As a developer working on such code bases, you are almost certainly going to have to work on a piece of code someone else wrote in the past, and conversely someone in the future is practically guaranteed to be made to work on code you wrote. Coding standards allows for what you wrote to be legible to whoever may read it in the future, as they would know what to expect thanks to the standard.
Conclusion
Coding standards are an essential tool used by companies or organizations working on large codebases to make work smoother, easier, and more efficient across huge teams of developers. Although potentially annoying and tedious at times, I can appreciate the purpose for and usefulness of coding standards. In this new age of programs developed by, or assisted in development by AI, such code may be harder to keep to a certain standard. The AI may be prone to mistakes in code generation, and debugging such mistakes can be incredibly tedious. On the flip side, AI can also be used to more easily check for any coding standard deviations, since such tools would be able to scan thousands of lines of code within seconds. No matter what the future of code development has in store, I am willing to bet that standardized code and the standardization of code in some form will always have a place in it, for as long as we write code the way we currently do.