Code Formatting And Standards

THE QUEST TO WRITE READABLE CODE.

Contents

• Formatting
• Linting
• Coding standards

Formatting

• Related to alignment of brackets, indentation, line breaks, etc.
• Produces visually appealing documents.
• Options:
• Prettier – JS
• flake8 / black / pylint - Python
• Other VSCode extensions
• Formatting enables enforcement of certain conventions:
• Alignment
• Indentation
• Tabs or spaces
• Empty lines

Linting

• Static analysis of the codebase to identify:
• Redundant variable declarations.
• Missing semicolons.
• Undefined usage.
• Single quoted strings.
• And many more stylistic errors.

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Formatting vs. Linting

• Making the code “look” nicer.

• Enforcement of best practices and standards.

Potential Problems: Linting

• Opinionated linting.

An example of errors found using airbnb eslint configuration.

Potential Problems: Formatting

Solution

• It is a good idea to create general guidelines with developer input.
• This reduces the need for external tools to enforce coding standards.
• Important to understand good coding practices and use them everywhere.

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What rules do we want to recommend?

• Readability over excessive rules.
• Using tabs instead of spaces for indentations.
• Spaced comments
• // This is a good comment
• //This is not
• space-before-blocks
• function abc() { //there is a space before the curly brace� … �}

Coding Standards Document

• Contributions by team leaders and developers.
• Link

Line Break Explanation

• Spaces between subsequent blocks

Setup

• .eslintrc.json and .prettierrc.json are stored in the root directory.
• Install VSCode Prettier, ESLint and Pylint extensions.

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• Errors will be highlighted in the Problems tab.
• Set tab size in VS Code to 4.
• Install black formatter for python scripts. (pip install black)
• Run using: python -m pip file.py

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