Have High (Coding) Standards!
13 Feb 2025Having your code is one thing, but making sure it’s understandable by anyone who might come across it is an entirely different ballpark! Coding standards are in place for many software engineers so that like-minded developers can communicate in a roughly similar manner that allows us to understand and be familiar with another coder’s work.
Make It Prettier
ESLint Prettier, while annoying at times, is a very useful tool to help our code digestable. I do have experience with a feature like this that I used in my second introductory course to Java at KCC in JGrasp called CheckStyle that helped us make sure we used JavaDoc comments, checked whether our lines were at the right indentation, and overall made our code more uniform.
Though it might not seem like the most essential part of programming, it’s one that helps our code look presentable. Regarding programming as an assignment, whoever views your story, like a TA or professor, should have an easy time digesting the code and seeing where each line indents and understanding why is just one important aspect of a functioning program that could be reviewed by someone else. The red squiggly lines and captions of your errors may feel rather abrasive at times, but is overall meant to help you.
A Large Assist
Something I found interesting about the recent shift in programming is how much assistance is provided through the extensions. When the time came to work on coding five basic functions every programmer should know, I found myself being GIVEN the answer! All I had begun to write was the function name, and a combination of the extensions I had downloaded managed to write the entire body of the function for me!
This feature is surely meant to help the programmer, but I found myself wishing I had come to write the code on my own. Guidance is great assistance, but providing the entire answer was a bit of a nuisance for me. If I wished to practice my coding skills and how I can come to build a function, the assistance would have already read my mind and completed the code for me.
Wrap up
So far, I’m very satisfied with our means of programming. We’re doing a lot more hands on action. Creating a repository in GitHub, cloning it to our Desktop, and working it out in VSCode with a live preview of our console readily avaiable. It’s great exposure to what coding on your own might feel like and shows us what our futures could have in store the further we travel into this field of programming.