

Be the Change You Wish to See in Your Codebase - writetehcodez
http://www.brian-driscoll.com/2012/12/be-change-you-wish-to-see-in-your.html

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lmm
Standards are not worth it. The only value in documented standards is in
providing an authoritative source to resolve disagreements - but if there is
no disagreement there is no harm and often a lot of good in developers
deviating from the standards.

What are the advantages suggested here? Automate parts of your code? Don't use
string manipulation on source to do that, that's evil. Measure SLOC? Who
cares. Create a code analysis engine to keep everything matching the spec?
Circular reasoning.

The underlying point is valid - rather than trying to document what good code
is, the best way for senior developers to get junior developers to write good
code is to write good code themselves, and particularly to refactor existing
code as they work on it. (Don't try and do it all in one go, just make sure
that each file you change you leave a little better than it was). But what
constitutes good code is very hard to capture in a standards document - and
given that no-one will read or follow said standards document, why bother?

~~~
writetehcodez
The underlying point is the point - which is that the best documentation of
coding standards is the code itself. Automating code generation, analysis,
measurement, etc are just some other benefits that come out of standardizing
code if one chooses to implement them.

