The first thing that comes to mind when I think of standards are the company procedures and policies that all of the employees need to abide by. At my previous work place, we usually worked in shifts of 1 to 2 people at a time and there are 2 shifts per day. Everything runs pretty smoothly from the start up procedure each morning, to changing of shifts, and closing procedures at the end of the day. Having a coding standard in place is extremely beneficial in my eyes not only from the approach of learning a programming language but also for collaboration efforts, work environments, and many other practical things that software engineers do each day.
In my software engineering class, we are required to use the IDE called IntelliJ Idea for our projects using Javascript, which supports a coding standard called ESLint. I am not too sure yet if having coding standards can actually help me to learn a programming language, but as for now, it is helpful when it automatically tells you basic errors I make. Personally, I like the fact that it even gives basic syntactic errors such as not indenting or spacing correctly. In general, I consider myself a perfectionist and even without a coding standard, I always try to make my code consistent with the same amount of spacings and indenting throughout. So it feels nice to know that I am writing my code in a consistent manner, as long as I fix the errors it provides and get a green check mark when all the errors are fixed. This way, I can learn how to always create code that is neatly organized and consistent.
I would imagine that being consistent in writing code is extremely important especially when you are working as a team to build a software. In fact, you will most likely be building a software as a team, just as any large tech companies have teams to develop a certain program. First of all, working as a team, you need to be able to combine multiple people’s work. Having coding standards is very important in order to be able to do this because the entire code needs to look as if one person wrote it. If everybody wrote their code differently without any standards, obviously the code is going to look like a mess with no consistency. Secondly, you need other people to be able to understand your code especially when working as a team. If your code or the combined code looks inconsistent, other developers will have a hard time understanding your code and will not be able to improvise or debug your code easily. Like writing a term paper software requires drafts to be reviewed and fixed many times before it can be released to public. Even after carefully reviewed, it is common that softwares can be improvised and thus a lot of softwares have multiple versions of itself. Well-built softwares are written in a consistent manner so that developers can go back and understand the code, debug, or improvise it easily.
Through programming with coding standards, I hope to not just learn a programming language, but also to learn how to make my code consistent. By learning how to write code in a consistent manner, I hope to be able to attain a skill to collaborate with other people. I believe that coding standard is beneficial for any software engineer in the long run.