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Have you ever had to work to coding standards that:
If so, what is your least favorite rule and why?
Some examples here
Nearly any sort of variable naming convention that reiterates the variable type, mutability, scope / storage class, and/or their reference. Basically, any construct intrinsic to the language. This is no longer necessary in the 21st century with modern IDEs (and in my opinion only originally solved poor code layout / practices to begin with). This includes hungarian notation and its variants:
or things like:
and of course one the farthest reaching eyesore in OOP, m_ for all members. If you can't be sure / keep track of which variables are local, members, globals, static, or final/const, you might be writing unclear, poorly factored, spaghetti code.
This is wholey different than specifying a prefix/suffix convention for things like min, max, avg, size, count, index, et cetera, which is fine.
I worked for a short time in Japan. I was doing complex mathematical coding. The company coding standard was to have absolutely no comments. It was difficult as I would have liked to add some comments to explain the complex calculations and not forget myself after few weeks. Pity the next guy who comes after me to understand what the code was doing.
It was the first time I ever saw that coding comments were prohibited.
Worst standard I've ever had to face:
StyleCop for C#
Take every pointless standard ever and put it into a tool that runs at compile time instead of in the IDE at design time.
//this is not a legal comment.
// nor is this
// must be followed by a single space, if you are debugging, use //// to comment code. Properties must also have 'triple slash' comments and they must read "Gets or Sets xxxxx" complete with a period at the end and properly capitalized.
Ugh. Maybe there's a point with widely published APIs but my main beef is they surely could have built it as a plugin a la R#.
// Initialize balloon release context. , but not here: // If malloc fails.
Dec 14, 2010 at 4:06
Mandatory inclusion, expansion of $Log$ information when our SCC was antiquated version of PVCS. We had some files where the $Log$ information was much, much longer than the actual code in the file.
The worst was a project (C++) where classes were prefixed with module abbreviations.
For example, if something was in the MessagePassing module, and part of the Response mechanism, it might be called MESPAS_RESSomeobject.
Working on that code made me want to gouge out my eyes.
Not the worst, but my current job requires a c_ prefixes on classes and e_ prefixes for enums. Nothing for structs. but _t postfix on typedefs. It's pretty ugly too.
Oh, and function header comments in BOTH .h and .cpp (declaration and definition) which of course almost never match.
My favorite is the "No magic numbers" rule applied cluelessly. For example, I once saw a comment in a code review stating then the "No magic numbers" rule had been violated by this line of code:
if (fscanf(file, "%s %hd",name, nbrObject ) != 2 )
I guess the reviewer wanted a constant instead of 2, such as #define TWO 2
All output in a PHP script must be echoed line by line.
<?php
echo "<div id=\"foo\">";
echo "<h1>" . $title . "</h1>";
echo paragraphs($body); // just an example
echo "</div>";
?>
(Disclaimer: I didn't have to follow it, but a team I worked with did.)
At a previous job, the C# standard was to have at least two spaces between type name and variable name in declarations, the method name must begin on the next line from the access modifiers and return type, a space must occur before any open-punctuation (parenthesis or bracket), all variable declarations at the beginning of the method, declarations separate from assignment and the indentation was 3 spaces. Example:
private static int
ThisIsTheMethod (int code, string message)
{
int i;
int j;
int k;
for (i = 0; i < message.Length; i++)
{
if (message [i] == '!') return -1;
}
j = SomeMethod (code);
k = OtherMethod (j);
return k;
}
While ugly, it was workable with the exception that Visual Studio really didn't want things that way and it was more an extra step after coding "normally" to reformat it as this.
Our method names had to be in the format 'Get/Set/Add/Delete' + name of the target object + names of all the parameters.
GetUserById(userId);
InsertUser(user);
DeleteUser(user);
Fair enough - but the rule very strict. Complex object types were not allowed to be abbreviated, and operations always had to list every request parameter, no matter how ridiculous:
GetCustomerOrderDeliveryDetailsByCustomerIdAndDeliveryDateAndOrderStatus(...
After adding in the full variable names (which weren't allowed to be shortened, either) you can imagine how long some simple method calls were. Word wrappingly long.
at my previous job, which I gladly quit 3 months ago:
database:
asp.net / c# / javascript
bit - it cannot be part of an index, whereas a tinyint can be part of an index and you can add a CHECK constraint to restrict it to the values 0 and 1. +1 for the try/catch rule.
I currently work in a company where SQL queries are done through something called "Request Class". How ridiculous:
In "include/request.class.php"
class RequestClass
{
// ... some code.
public function getUser($where)
{
global $initrequest
$sql = $initrequest['users']
$sql.= $where;
return execute($sql);
}
}
In initrequest.php:
$initrequest['users'] = 'SELECT * FROM users WHERE ';
And it was called from the application in this way:
$request = new request();
$tmpquery = "username = $username AND password = $password";
$request->getUsers($tmpquery);
And they have a similar template system based in "blocks", but after understanding what I show here, I kept pressing to trash our whole software and rewrite it in Symfony.
Where I'm working now the variable naming process for anything dealing with the database is:
Which makes sense, however when I brought up the point that the convention was too generic and that this would end up with variable overlap the response was "use result_alt or sql_alt." My feelings on commenting, if you used proper variable names that signify purpose you wouldn't need comments or as many of them.
Having what amounted to C header files, in a Java project.
Interfaces exist for some good reasons, but this standard mandated an interface (foo.java) for every single class (fooImpl.java) whether it made any sense or not. Lots of stuff to keep in sync, complete disruption of Eclipse click-into-method, pointless busy-work.
The build system enforced it, but I cannot imagine what the original purpose was. Fortunately we ditched it for new code when we switched to a new version-control and build system, but there's still a lot of it about.
At the same time we also ditched the stupid version-control-info-in-file-comments habit which had been mandatory.
void someMethod(Set<X> s) but not void someMethod(HashSet<X> s)) and if you use the plain name for the class it can be ambiguous (is class Set<X> a tree or a hash table? And what if you already have one in your library and want to add the other?)
foo.frobnosticateWith(bar);, ctrl-click on frobnosticateWith, and find yourself at the interface definition of the method rather than the implementation you wanted to see. It's fine when interfaces are being used for good, and maybe there are (or could be) multiple implementations, but this is not the case here.
The worst coding standard I ever had to follow was "All object variable names must be prefixed with 'obj'". This was on a big Java project, so almost everything was an object. The worst part was, almost everyone adopted a policy of naming variables by simply prepending "obj" to the class name. We wound up with stuff like Person objPerson1 throughout the code. I objected once, and had one of the other developers interject that she liked the convention "because then I don't have to think about my variable names". That place was a real horrorshow...
Maybe The Huawei Software Company's coding standard. They want you to declare all members public:))
Writing anything in Fortran (WATFOR, FORTRAN 77) where a non-whitespace character in column 1 was a comment, and the compiler didn't warn you if you went beyond column 72, it would just silently ignore it.
At least I only spent seven years doing this.
My favorite would have to be the database naming guidelines we currently are trying to abide by. All tables used for many-many relationships should be named using the names of the linked tables and must be suffixed with "Link". And of course, no pluralization of table names.
"Do not use C++ comment style for C code".
While this may still have a small value if there is risk of needing to port your program to an obsolete compiler, it's mostly just a hassle. My biggest objection is that it makes it really hard to use /* to block comment out a large region during development or unit testing. */
/* comments. Then an upgraded version allowed // comments. Then // comments were deprecated because the compiler vendor wanted to follow the standard more strictly. Then eventually we switched to another C99 compiler. Then we adopted another standard where /* comments were deprecated. Each time we had to change all comments in the whole project. Fortunately the project was relatively small (~200K LOC)
No more than one line of code allowed in Main()
A professor at my university who I was fortunate enough not to have insisted that her junior C# students not be allowed to put more than one line of code in their console applications' entry point.
This makes a reasonable amount of sense when developing a professional application, but when the program's only intent is to take few basic inputs and produce a single output (i.e. MultiplyTwoNumbers.exe), such a requirement is more pain than good.
On top of the "one line of code in main" the professor also insisted that every line of code have a descriptive comment and every class member have a verbosely descriptive name. Points lost if the professor didn't feel that these requirements had been met "adequately".
The students forced to stick to these rules were (almost) all newbies to programming and thus I can see the value of enforcing conducts like good-naming and separation of concerns. Despite that, as the .NET Tutor at my university I was constantly helping her students meet these mundane and obnoxious requirements long after they had gotten their code working.
In my opinion, when educating someone who is brand new to a programming language the first concern should be how to create code, not how to create standards-based code.
(C++)
All return values had to be HRESULTS (the standard ones - not user defined hresults)
This was just a few years ago. The senior people were still so infatuated with COM and they never read or learned of other best practices. It was an amazingly closed environment.
The same place also did not allow using STL.
I left shortly after I found out that tidbit.
My ADA lecturer at uni insisted that every method had a comment outlining preconditions, postconditions and big O. The biggest issue with this was that he never bothered to explain what big O actually meant and never checked if they were correct so I found myself copying and pasting this comment block hundreds of times.
-- Method_Name
-- PRECONDITIONS: none
-- POSTCONDITIONS: none
-- O(n) = n
In Visual Basic 6.0, we had to add error handling blocks to every single method. No exceptions. So we did.
Then we had to explain why parts of the application were slow.
Limited space for variable/object names is probably my largest irritation. I've worked in a relatively modern, proprietary language that only allows 10 characters. This is a holdover from its original versions.
The net result is that you end up with funny naming conventions defining what each character of your allowed 10 is to represent. Something like:
At one company we had to write technical documenation that explained how we will write a functionality. It fast got out-dated since you wont think about everything when youre programming in UML.
Being forced to add a file description in each file (it's a C# project).
// --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
// <copyright file="User.cs" company="Company">
// Copyright (C) 2009 Company. All rights reserved.
// </copyright>
// <summary>
// The user.
// </summary>
// --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I find many of the Mono coding guidelines to be pointless or counter-productive. For example:
There are a number of other guidelines there which are just "good practices", without reasoning.