On 24 Jul 2008, at 19:31, mike wrote:
On 7/24/08, Stut <stuttle@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
That's not just bad, it's downright anti-productive. You need to
either have
a standard style across a team or accept that other developers
format their
code differently. If you spend time reformatting other peoples code
it's a
waste of your time. Differently (not that I didn't say badly)
formatted code
does not make it wrong, it's just different and if you can't live
with that
then you need to work on getting your preferred format adopted as the
standard for the team.
We've shown the team and new people join all the time. They bring
their own styles, use crap editors which leave extra linefeeds,
spaces, etc. all over. It's fine, as I am reviewing their code anyway,
it helps me think clearer, and since I have to support fixing the bugs
later on, I can go back to it and read it quicker as well.
Now if I was just cleaning it up and never seeing it again, yes, it
would be a waste of time. But everything usually falls on my plate
when nobody else can figure it out.
Obviously you can run your team the way you want to, but personally I
prefer to get all my developers singing from the same hymn sheet such
that after a couple of weeks they can go to any part of the code and
not see a horrific mess because they're used to the coding style and
be able to conform to that style when they make changes.
Any half-decent developer should be able to adopt any style they're
told to. Likewise they should be able to use any editor you tell them
to, but even if you would prefer to be flexible in the name of
productivity there are very few editors beyond Notepad that can't use
a particular EOL and auto-strip trailing spaces. As far as extra
linefeeds "etc" that's all coming from the developer unless you're
using WYSIWYG editors. I've met far too many developers who don't care
about formatting their code and unless you slap their nose for it they
won't change.
Yes it takes effort, and yes you will meet resistance, but for me the
benefits of getting everyone in sync are worth it.
-Stut
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