Style not Substance
A good coding standard should be about style and form, not about substance. It should not attempt to legislate good design. It should not, for example, proscribe goto or public variables. Those rules are part of the body of knowledge that all software developers should have, and are not a matter of style.
Coding standards should be about the things that don’t matter. They should be about brace placement, naming conventions, the use of blank lines, indentation levels, etc. A coding standard should describe the way code looks, not the substance the code is made from.
It is important to keep style and substance separate because they matter for different reasons. Issues of style matter only for consistency. It does not matter whether your indent depth is 2 or 4, so long as everyone uses the same depth. It does matter if you use public variables inappropriately.
Oral/Code Tradition
Documents that describe coding standards tend to be useless. They often become a bloated battleground for many different competing ideas. My advice is to avoid writing them.
The real document that describes your coding standard is your code. If you want to know how to name a variable, look at how they are named in the code. If you want to know what the standard indent depth is, look in the code. The code is the living document that describes the coding standard.
Oral tradition plays a role as well; especially when communicating issues of substance vs. style. Teams should make use of code reviews and pair programming to communicate with each other about issues of style and substance. New members of the team should have frequent exposure to the more seasoned members, so that the issues of style and substance are inculcated with moral authority. Nothing is quite as persuasive to a young programmer than pairing with the lead programmer and hearing him say: “We don’t do things that way; we do things this way.”
گزیده:
Real seriousness in regard to writing is one of two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent. Ernest Hemingway
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