I think that coding standards can be very beneficial. I have yet to work on a large scale project in a group but I can imagine that having a coding standard would make one a lot more manageable. When I code alone I tend to be fairly consistent with how I write my code. I find it very helpful to have my code written in a neat and orderly fashion. It’s a bit different when you have to work in a group and you are not the one making the coding standard. You might have to write your code in a way that you don’t prefer but in the grand scheme of things it’s worth it simply because the code is much more readable and less prone to errors.
When I first started programming, I honestly wasn’t very fond of the idea of a coding standard. I’ve had a few teachers in the past that were strict about how our code was supposed to be written. I would say that some of my past teacher’s coding standard have led me to lose a few of my bad programming habits and I ended up being thankful in the end. I suspect that the main reason that my teachers would do that was not only to teach good programming habits but also so that the assignment would be easier to read for grading. Having to read several different coding styles while grading school assignments can be jarring and I believe it’s the same case for reading the code of several different people who have all worked on the same project. I’m not bothered by having a coding standard enforced anymore. I don’t really think it’s that thing like whether a bracket goes on its own line or not are that big of a deal.
This week in my software engineering class, we’ve started to use eslint to ensure that our code follows the standard given by our teacher. Anytime I write code that breaks one of the rules of the standard, eslint will underline the error and tell me what the problem is. I had a lot of trouble getting eslint to work in the IDE I’m using, Intellij, but I’ve had no trouble once I managed to get it working. Later on in this semester I am going to have to work in a group and I can see this being a useful tool at that time.