Coding Standards
Posted: Mon Nov 17, 2008 4:41 amOn my first day on job, I was told by my then Project Manager Mr. Subu that I should be spending time reading lot of manuals and documentations of the company. I never understood why would me, appointed a software engineer to develop applications on Cobol and AS/400 be spending (read wasting) time reading documentation? 12 years and 5 days have passed since and I guess I can say that eventually I understood why he wanted me to spend time reading for more than 2 weeks, before I was assigned the simplest of the tasks.
I don't want to go into the details of all the things I realized from that experience, but I want to talk about the Coding Standards we are supposed to follow. What is the necessity to have a standard for coding? For a person developing the application it may not matter much, but as we all know a software maintenance is where the true mettle lies. Since TW is into PHP programming, let's take into context various things that we need to keep in mind as a responsible PHP programmer. If you had to go through your code in a few weeks or months, will you be able to understand what's happening without looking at every line and functions?
I remember my days as a COBOL programmer where people have named variables as a, b, c and what not!!!!! Not only was the variable names "un-understandable" but comments were not available either. There are various coding standards in the industry and we can use what suits us the most.
, one which perhaps we can adopt as well.
I don't want to go into the details of all the things I realized from that experience, but I want to talk about the Coding Standards we are supposed to follow. What is the necessity to have a standard for coding? For a person developing the application it may not matter much, but as we all know a software maintenance is where the true mettle lies. Since TW is into PHP programming, let's take into context various things that we need to keep in mind as a responsible PHP programmer. If you had to go through your code in a few weeks or months, will you be able to understand what's happening without looking at every line and functions?
I remember my days as a COBOL programmer where people have named variables as a, b, c and what not!!!!! Not only was the variable names "un-understandable" but comments were not available either. There are various coding standards in the industry and we can use what suits us the most.
, one which perhaps we can adopt as well.