Is Programming Style important? How Important? [closed]

Answer 1

If want to throw away your source-code after writing it, it's OK to ignore styles. That applies for fast scripts, that you make for your task, that really runs only once. On the other hand, how often it happens, that the task that was supposed to run only once will be reused later.

Reusing may be OK, but it will later hard to understand what happens. If you want to modify the code later, you are lost without some style.

How important a proper styling is, depends on how long you will use and modify the code and how many will work on it.

If you work in a team, speak about which styles should be applied.

Answer 2

Your friend needs to get his prioritys right, and in my opinion I believe microsoft would care more then you seem to think they would.

Answer 3

Well, the fact is that the software life cycle phase in which it lives the longest is maintenance. During that time it is mostly read and analyzed by humen trying to fix it, reuse it, enhance it, etc. That is the best reason to keep it easily readable and understendable. Someone stating that he has no time to worry about style, which explicitly influences readibility, shows only his immaturity as software engineer. Or maybe simply no understanding of software life cycle.

Answer 4

Well, there's life, and then there's interviews.

Ask your friend - would he show up to the interview in tattered jeans and a grubby t-shirt?

His task in the interview (no matter what the format) is to impress the person conducting the interview. Impress them enough to get offered a job.

So if applying for a programmer job, why in the world would this guy submit "tattered jeans and grubby t-shirt" code?

I really hope this person has some clue about coding style, comments and whitespace. In that case, he made the judgement call that the interviewer was more concerned about "rightness" than about "goodness" (my interpretation).

BUT - given the task (linked list? this should be easy-peasy for a programmer), it would seem the task is about far more than just "rightness" of the code.

I suspect the interviewer was looking for many things, INCLUDING good coding practice (it's 1000x harder to "unlearn" bad programming practice than to get them right at the start). The interviewer was probably also looking for something to indicate initiative, good assumption making, perhaps even creativity or inventiveness.

For example, there are many ways to write a linked list that are "correct", but some (like using recursion) are deemed more "elegant" than others.

I suspect your friend missed the mark on several levels in this interview.

-R

Answer 5

A developer who doesn't care about style is like an artist, a painter, who doesn't care about color.

Answer 6

I'd like to know how any decent programmer could write code without indentation, whether it is done in an IDE, vi, Notepad, on a whiteboard, or on a post-it. Indenting the code should come naturally. I wouldn't call him back if what he turned in looked something like this (I'm just copying the implementation off of Wikipedia, focus is on lack of indentation):

struct Node{
data
next
prev
}
struct List{
Node firstNode
Node lastNode
}
function insertAfter(List list, Node node, Node newNode) {
newNode.prev := node
newNode.next := node.next
if node.next = null
list.lastNode := newNode
else
node.next.prev := newNode
node.next := newNode
}
function insertBefore(List list, Node node, Node newNode) {
newNode.prev := node.prev
newNode.next := node
if node.prev is null
list.firstNode := newNode
else
node.prev.next := newNode
node.prev    := newNode
}
function remove(List list, Node node){
if node.prev = null
list.firstNode := node.next
else
node.prev.next := node.next
if node.next = null
list.lastNode := node.prev
else
node.next.prev := node.prev
destroy node
}