Many people pass off “coding standards” as an annoyance they would rather not deal with. Why go through the pain of adding extra spaces in your source code if the program runs the same? “Coding standards” may not seem important, however I believe they are an essential technique every software engineer should implement into their practice.
Coding standards can make learning a new programming language easier. I had a professor who taught program structure in C/C++, who was very strict with his coding standards. Although many in our class disliked these coding standards, I thought they were helping me learn the programming language faster, so I didn’t mind. Having consistency in the way I organized my code also made going back and looking at my old code much easier to understand.
Another reason every software engineer should implement “coding standards” into their practice is because is makes working with other developers much more efficient. I have previously worked on a group project with other developers where we didn’t follow a coding standard, and a project where we did. The readability of our code and efficiency of our group increased significantly when coding standards were followed.
Coding standards are an essential technique every software engineer should practice. By doing so, learning a new programming language becomes easier, readability of code increases, and working with other developers becomes much more efficient.