Week 1, year 2013

• Using Contextual Code Formatting for Readability - I used to care a great deal about having a coding standard. I often took the initiative to write a document for the team that described the do’s and don’ts, and I was often the one setting up automated formatting sniffers on every commit. I’ve come to see that we have been ignoring an opportunity to use formatting to our advantage. By arguing and voting over standards, and building automated tools to do the formatting for us, and refusing commits that failed the formatting validators, we lost track of why we needed a standard in the first place. It’s not to fulfil the desire of the pedants in our teams, or for the esthetic of neatly aligned spaces. The goal should be to write easily readable and maintainable code. [Mathias Verraes]

Permalink | From 31 December 2012 to 06 January 2013 | Last updated on: Mon, 7 Jun 2021 09:18:52 GMT