Advice for new software devs who've read all those other advice essays

Re:Advice for new software devs who've read all those other ... by max_sendfeld on Wednesday December 20, 2023 @08:23AM (#38708348)

Absolutely! I'm grateful that I don't have to worry about code formatting any more. But I remember in one of my earliest job the company used style checkers as a pre-commit hook that rejected your commit if they found trailing whitespace. That was before code formatting was part of your IDE. (Especially for us front end devs who used Notepad++ rather than an IDE at the time).

And notepad++ had no easy way of showing trailing whitespace. So every commit was a dance of commit -> read rejection log -> remove trailing whitespace -> commit again.

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Re:Advice for new software devs who've read all those other ... by hudell on Wednesday December 20, 2023 @08:32AM (#38708446)

I once worked on a project that would not even compile if a function had a param without a comment explaining the purpose of that param written with a specific format. Every comment was validated on compile time, you couldn't even comment code just to test something. Life was hell.

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Re:Advice for new software devs who've read all those other ... by EZ-E on Wednesday December 20, 2023 @08:28AM (#38708409)

I have memories at my post grad school where any deviations from the expected code source formatting led to a -1 on the mark. On the first few projects it was not rare to see students getting marks well into two or three digits negatives.

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Re:Advice for new software devs who've read all those other ... by bluGill on Wednesday December 20, 2023 @11:18AM (#38710281)

Things that don't matter much. A nice consistent style is good to have, but it isn't something worth worrying about that much.

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Re:Advice for new software devs who've read all those other ... by yakshaving_jgt on Wednesday December 20, 2023 @10:13AM (#38709522)

What's stopping you from configuring your editor to automatically strip trailing whitespace on save?

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Re:Advice for new software devs who've read all those other ... by skirmish on Wednesday December 20, 2023 @11:57AM (#38710766)

Code reviewers that made me type in trailing whitespace that editor stripped: "this change is on lines you are not modifying". Still makes my blood boil many years later.

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Re:Advice for new software devs who've read all those other ... by max_sendfeld on Wednesday December 20, 2023 @10:24AM (#38709659)

Mostly the fact that this was 15 years ago :-)

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