From: arne@vajhoej.dk

On 8/29/2025 9:24 AM, Dan Cross wrote:
> In article ,
> bill   wrote:
>> Which is why I always preferred working for people with well defined
>> local coding (and comment) standards.  And, yes, I have worked for both.
>
> Yup, though this doesn't _really_ address the question.
>
> But yes: having a locally agreed upon style for such things is a
> _huge_ boon for maintainability, particularly across a large
> codebase.  Sure, it's fun to belly up to the virtual bar and
> debate the relative merits of different styles on USENET,
> complete with contrived examples for or against different
> conventions.  But the reality is that if one is consistent
> within a code base, it doesn't really matter all that much;
> competent programmers will absorb the rules in a matter of days
> or weeks.

Yes.

> The issue is that someone has to define the style and then
> mandate its use, and it has to be enforced through rigorous
> review and automated tooling.  Given a sufficiently large group
> of users, not everyone is going to agree with every rule; the
> trick is in getting them to follow those rules regardless.

It does not take that much to get coding conventions
followed.

If >5% of code is reviewed and not following coding
convention get flagged and the guilty get asked to fix
the code *and* other code that has same problem, then
in a few months everyone is following. The risk of
non compliance eventually being detected and the hassle
of doing the fixes makes it easier to do the right
thing the first time.

Arne

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