Do you think a software company should impose developers a coding-style? [closed]

Answer 1

I would agree that consistency is key. You can't rely on IDE pretty-printing to save the day, because some of your developers may not like using an IDE, and because when you're trawling through a code base of thousands of source files, it's simply not feasible to pretty print all the files when you start working on them, and perform a roll-back afterwards so your VCS doesn't try to commit back all the changes (clogging the repository with needless updates that burden everyone).

I would suggest standardizing at least the following (in decreasing order of importance):

• Whitespace (it's easiest if you choose a style that conforms to the automatic pretty-printing of some shared tool)
• Naming (files and folders, classes, functions, variables, ...)
• Commenting (using a format that allows automatic documentation generation)

Answer 2

Every company should. Consistent coding style ensures higher readibility and maintainability of the codebase across whole your team.

The shop I work at does not have a unified coding standard, and I can say we (as a team) vastly suffer from that. When there is no will from the individuals (like in case of some of my colleagues), the team leader has to bang his fist on the table and impose some form of standardised coding guidelines.

Answer 3

I like Ilya's answer because it incorporates the importance of readability, and the use of continuous integration as the enforcement mechanism. Hibri mentioned FxCop, and I think its use in the build process as one of the criteria for determining whether a build passes or fails would be more flexible and effective than merely documenting a standard.

Answer 4

Yes, I think companies should. Developer may need to get used to the coding-style but in my opinion a good programmer should be able to work with any coding style. As Midhat said: It is important to have a consistent codebase.

I think this is also important for opensource projects, there is no supervisor to tell you how to write your code but many languages have specifications on how naming and organisation of your code should be. This helps a lot when integrating opensource components into your project.

Answer 5

In my opinion I think it's highly necessary with standards and style guides. Because when your code-base grows you will want to have it consistent.

As a side note, that is why I love Python; because it already imposes quite a lot of rules on how to structure your applications and such. Compare that with Perl, Ruby or whatever where you have an extreme freedom(which isn't that good in this case).

Answer 6

Like others have mentioned, I think it needs to be by engineering or by the team--the company (i.e. business units) should not be involved in that sort of decision.

But one other thing I'd add is any rules that are implemented should be enforced by tools and not by people. Worst case scenario, IMO, is some over-zealous grammar snob (yes, we exist; I know because we can smell our own) writes some documentation outlining a set of coding guidelines which absolutely nobody actually reads or follows. They become obsolete over time, and as new people are added to the team and old people leave, they simply become stale.

Then, some conflict arises, and someone is put in the uncomfortable position of having to confront someone else about coding style--this sort of confrontation should be done by tools and not by people. In short, this method of enforcement is the least desirable, in my opinion, because it is far too easy to ignore and simply begs programmers to argue about stupid things.

A better option (again, IMO) is to have warnings thrown at compile time (or something similar), so long as your build environment supports this. It's not hard to configure this in VS.NET, but I'm unaware of other development environments that have similar features.