Finally, I compromise...
11 Feb 2021
Finally, I compromise
When I ran my code in JSFiddle for the first time, I was confused. The first thing that came to my mind was “How could I have my code run successfully without fixing those ugly spaces?” Yes definitely, I just find myself getting used to making a space after every close parenthesis and semicolon, placing the close brace on a new line by itself. Thanks to the mandatory check-style implementation I have done for 211 class, it is not too painful to get the green mark with ESLint. One thing that keeps annoying me is the warnings of not using variables or functions or whatever, which I am unable to fix immediately. But overall, it is not bad to have my code clean and formatted. Whenever the coding standard gets me crazy, I would take a breath and recall the multiple times the 211 professor requested us to go over each other’s code, and nothing could be more painful than to try to understand lines of messy, self-creative code. Hence, I compromise.
I am an artist!
This is fun. I believe that every programmer would feel confident or overconfident about his work. Complaints like, “my personality and characteristics are reflected in my code” or “My code is a physical presence of my thinking, creativity, and skills and if you force me to obey rules that are not written in legislation, you are ruining my creativity”. Every programmer could be an artist, but how many of them could have become Vincent Van Gohn, Leonardo Da Vinci, or Pablo Picasso, whose artworks fascinate numerous people all around the world and keep motivating people to discover the mystery behind the artwork. Those masterpieces are probably hard to understand but absolutely worth efforts to be put in for evaluation and appreciation by any means, but my code is not. Standardized my code is to help me learn better as a beginner and adapt better to the community in the future. Hence, I compromise.
I am the one making rules
This is cool. One can be skillful and developed enough to write a supremely effective program, shortening the original length of a piece of code to an unexpected level. Indeed, in a large collaborative programming environment, if one thinks that the coding standard is totally unreasonable, then either the whole company is getting crazy or him getting crazy alone. Interestingly, the chance of each happening is not fairly equal. Hence, to prove that I am not crazy, I compromise.
Saving time? Wasting time?
Think about this: as a student, what if there is no standard for the selection of teaching materials? This can cause the school teaching system to be messy, making it extremely hard for students to understand the next high level of topics and for instructors to teach a group of students with different knowledge backgrounds. It is similar to programmers and readers. If a programmer doesn’t take it granted to make his code understandable and readable as easily as possible, despite the potential technical problems and debugging difficulties, he is saving his time temporarily, but wasting the team’s time ultimately. To not waste anyone’s time, I compromise.