Standards (was Re: indentation: enough already!)

[Mitch Che]

In article <3245 at ingr.com.> crossgl at ingr.UUCP (Gordon Cross) writes:
>deciphering other coding styles.  On the flip side, I must admit that I
>have also seen some VERY poorly written code (no comments, one letter global
>variables, etc).  The point I am trying to make here is that left alone good
>programmers write good code and bad programmers write bad code.  What is
>needed instead of stringent "standards" is a well thought out education plan
>whose goal is to make good programmers out of bad ones...

Left ALONE, 50 programmers will come up with 50 different reasons why 
the other 49 programmers should do it THEIR way.

Education is necessary. Unfortunately, many times the ones who are 
most educated, the "experts", regress and become "bad" programmers. 
A story: In a previous job, I worked with Fortran and APL. The 
expert programmers would compete to come up with the longest Fortran 
program in the world that could be converted to one line of APL. The 
result was typically something so obsure that even the author couldn't 
figure out what the APL code really did without the Fortran code. If 
we'd had standards for APL, perhaps they would have included something 
like, "Even though we KNOW you can do it and it's CLEAR as a BELL to 
you, do NOT put more than the equivalent of 100 Fortran statements on 
1 line of APL." half a :-) Only experts can do this and they, of 
course, know everything and are most likely to want to be left alone. 

Standards are imposed on workers for other people, not the people 
doing the work. People with engineering backgrounds who look at some 
"standards" for programmers would be happy to deal with these rather 
than what they have to put up with. Most standards for programmers 
are trivial, e.g. stylistic. Programmers who can't follow these, and 
complain about impacts on creativity and productivity should be forced 
to comment the code of 50-60 programmers for the benefit of the 
nearest maintenance group. 
-- 
Mitch Che   Pacific Bell   415-823-2454
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