Re: Ada95 Pretty-Printers/Coding styles

[<nospam.garriga@logica.com> (Stephen Garriga)]

On 16 Jun 1997 14:19:07 -0400, dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
wrote:

>Chris says
>
>>I feel that enforcing strict coding styles on individuals is
>unproductive and a source of irritation.  {SNIP}.....
>
>Thankyou Chris for giving a nice example of the attitude that I find
>unacceptable, and which we would not tolerate for a moment at ACT.
>It does not work at all to rely on pretty printing to solve the
>problem of divergent styles, because you still have people writing
>in their own style, and not being happy working on other people's
>code, so you get bad *code ownership* phenomena.
There is a big difference between people having their own syle, and
not wanting to work on other peoples 'differently styled' code. That's
like saying you can't enjoy reading a book that you did not write!

>
>Furthermore, style is much more than a set of mechanical rules wwhich can
>be enforced by an automaton, so you will never get realy consistent style
>(such as is achieved in the GNAT sources) by this approach.
Yes, but much of what causes problems is personal layout options; tabs
vs. spaces, indent levels, variable case etc.

>
>To get a really cooperative environment, in which everyone looks at every
>one else's code and there is as little sense of code ownership as possible,
>it is essential that everyone buy into a common style. It is definitely
>possible to come close to the ideal of 100% working in unison, and it is
>a desirable goal.
It is the nature of my work that I have to look at many peoples code,
each (suposedly) following a set of standards and conforming to a
style guide, however there is still a variety in 'style'. There are
often many ways of doing the same thing, unless you have every coder
incapable of aberent/creative thought (i.e. all coders are (mentally)
identical clones or brainwashed to the same end) you will still end up
with different 'styles'.

>
>I certainly understand Chris's attitude here, since I have run into it often
>before, and have seen situations in which companies tolerate this kind of
>insistance on personal style. Yes, you may regard my attitude's as extreme,
>so you probably would not like to come to work for ACT, but we have certainly
>found that lots of people get over their initial irritation at an unfamiliar
>style, and end up buying into it with enthusiasm (and the ACT engineers are
>all in this category!)
I would rather code were clear (self documenting) than following a
rigid set of rules. People are individuals and should be allowed to
act as such. I for one would not work for a company that insisted I
wore a suit every day, or that I must be clean-shaven. By the same
principle I could not work for a company that wanted me to be a
trained dog to jump through hoops or a mindless automaton!

Steve Garriga                         garriga@logica.com                 
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