Is Programming Style important? How Important? [closed]

Answer 1

Programming without identing and a readable style is like writing a book without paragraphs and pagebreaks. It's just a great bunch of text and I would never take time to understand it.

I fully understand the reaction of Microsoft - I wouldn't call him back too.

Answer 2

Formatting doesn't take any time whatsoever. It's a crappy excuse. Just let your editor format it when you're done for the sake of the violent psychopath.

Answer 3

Programming style is very important. Clean code pleases the eye and improves maintainability of the program. Therefore it's directly bound with the quality and the architecture of the program itself.

Even in a language that forces indentation one can really broke everything with bad style. Bad style may not therefore be lack of indentation or comments. Actually, I rarely use comments, I much rather prefer docstrings and overall writing better documentation. I associate comments to small notes you spread around the code if you really see there's something to fix or wonder about in there.

I'd rather see bad style as not letting the programming language do some of your stuff for you. Proper, cleanly written macro in a place or two is really good style rather than bad.

Answer 4

It's all a matter of who is the intended audience of the source code. The correct answer is "other programmers" (maintainers, etc). Your collegue thought it was not important and I fully understand why MS didn't hire him. I would be surprised if any big company would hire him at all!

I remember an old article titled "Typographic style is more than cosmetic" appeard on "Communications of ACM" that made experiments on the impact of good formatted code on productivity.

They took a group of programmers and gave them a test to rank them. Then they divided the group in two the two group the same assignment: modify a piece of software to add some functionality.

Only that the first group got a nicely formatted source code to work on and the others had a rather messy version of the same code.

They measured their productivty again and the end result was that the WORST programmer of the first group scored better than the BETTER programmer of the second group.

Since then, I always put extra effort in makingmy code clear to read for other humans.

For those interested in the topic I suggest reading about literate programming, intentional programming and other related concepts.

Answer 5

If you spend more time on indenting code than actually writing it, it could be a problem. But source code styling, conventions and consistency across the solution is important.

That is why I rely on a tool to do that. Resharper allows me to reformat all my code by pressing Ctrl+F, E keys combination.

Answer 6

This is why coding standards are needed. The team should adhere to the standards even if its not how they normally code. He could learn alot for actually maintaining someone else's mess, like what I have. 7000 lines of C++ write in C style split over 7 methods (most methods are 600+ lines), lots of one line macros which contain gotos to labels within the methods. There is also lots one line if statements, and macros added to the end of these and other methods calls which you won't see because you have to scroll to see them. Add to that terrible variable names and inconsistent bracketing style and you get an unmaintainable mess. The positive thing is it works well and we have relied upon it for years.