When I began to learn coding back in high school I started out by learning Python. The class I took had a section on coding and we were taught python since that was what the curriculum saw as the easiest language for beginner students to pick up. My files were not clean at all and I didnt bother much with making the code readable since in my mind, at the time, the whole point was to just get the assignment done and we weren’t graded on the style anyways. The same thing sort’ve occured in my AP computer science classes I took during my senior year however the teachers were a bit more strict and generally speaking, Java requires more organization. I had this habit where I would make the curly braces on the next line after a function or main and not use too many tab spacing for anything. Towards the end of the year I cleaned up my act a little but those bad habits still persisted. I feel bad for the poor soul who had to grade my AP exam.
Fast forward to ICS 111 and the coding style is required to be a little different. The braces have to be on the same line and tabs are expected. Okay, that wasn’t too hard for me to pick up and eclipse caught more errors than any of the high school level IDEs did. My code was beginning to resemble actual organized code. I move on to 211 and suddenly I hit this brick wall. We were expected to use a coding style plugin in eclipse and boy did that tank my grade for the first few assignments. I had initially thought I had installed this file right and everything was coming up milhouse. I get some of my grades back and suddenly I have a 6 or 5 on an assignment because the code was either too difficult to read and/or I had really goofed up the syntax. Sprinkle that in with a little errors here in there logically with my code and you end up with the grades I recieved. At that point I realized either I hadn’t installed it right or I didn’t install it at all. My code and coding style quickly shaped up as well as my grades once I corrected my mistakes.
This semester I’m taking ICS 314 and ICS 212. Oddly enough both of these classes have very similar coding standards but with minute changes. ICS 314 has the same style as 211 did but just uses a different checking system while 212 has strange quirks. One of the things that vexed me with 212 is that the professor wanted the curly braces on new lines, much like I used to do back in high school. That is what I see as the biggest problem with coding styles or standards. There really needs to be one golden and final standard that is required so that everyone can understand the code and not have to worry about one more thing especially in an educational environment like college. While I don’t think coding standards directly help you learn a language I think that if there was an agreed upon standard throughout the campus and ICS courses the coding standard would become second nature and the student could just focus on learning the material of the course.