Have you ever tried to make sense of someone else's notes and just been completely lost? Which of these would you rather read? I'm guessing you picked the one on the right. When I taught Algebra 2, I was constantly looking over students notes and work to help them solve problems. I noticed a significant difference in students who kept their work neat versus those who just scribbled numbers here and there on their paper. First of all, when I asked a student to explain their thinking process to me, those who had a system for showing their work could easily walk me through, step by step, which made it easy for me to point out any errors to them. Those who did NOT solve problems systematically would often get lost trying to explain their process to me and would have to start from scratch. It made such a difference that I started requiring students to follow certain guidelines when solving equations. You can look at coding in a similar light. You are going through a logical series of steps to achieve your end goal. So, it naturally follows that coders would also benefit from adhering to some type of standard for "showing their work" as well.

In my humble opinion, coding standards are a necessary guideline for anyone who wants to code more than a 20-line program. The importance of having "neat" code goes far beyond just because it looks nice. Messy code is basically equivalent to messy handwriting or completely ignoring the lines on folder paper when you’re writing. Similarly, trying to read messy code, whether to debug it, or just to understand it is painful at best. So why not avoid all that by adhering to some coding standards? At first you may find it annoying, painful, or excessive. You may ask yourself, “**WHY** is it necessary to have so many spaces?!” But overtime, it will become second nature to do these things and you will reap the benefits. When you’ve been staring at a screen for 6 hours straight, those *spaces* you hated so much are suddenly making it 10 times easier to read your code. Those indentations make it easier to follow your logic from 2 days ago and those well-named variables are saving your life because you have no clue what you were thinking when you typed that code at 1am the night before. And when, God forbid, you have to ask someone for help, they won’t disown you when they go through and try to make sense of your code. All of the sudden, Checkstyle and ESLint go from pesky anal-retentive supervisors to welcome contributors with your best interests at heart.

The moral of the story is, if you hate your coding standards right now, ***stick it out.*** It’s worth it in the end. For you and any other poor soul who has to read through your code in the future.
\**If you think I feel strongly about this, wait till you hear what I have to say about commenting your code.* 😄