Who cares about style?

I do. Its weird the things that irritate you, but bad style is quickly becoming a top ten pet-peeve. Code style is something that is easily taken for granted and you never fully appreciate it until its gone. I’ve been fortunate to have worked on many projects over the past few years where basic style conventions were enforced, and not by tools such as checkstyle or PMD, but by an actual human.

Using tools to aid in enforcing style can help, but they end up being pretty poor at the end of the day at guaranteeing that you will have nice readable/understandable code. As code bases grow very large, it becomes evermore important that we help our brains navigate quickly and the use of proper style sends subtle signals about the flow of a class. When I see camel-case starting with a lowercase letter I know its a method, uppercase and I know its a constructor.

Strangely enough I am not actually calling for people to follow ‘all’ of the rules of a style guide just rules like the following:

• packages contain lowercase letters only
• classes start with an uppercase letter
• Constructors start with an uppercase letter (this is a freebie if you follow above)
• methods start with lowercase letters
• code blocking such as if/for/while/do always use braces

Following these rules should be pretty easy, actually it should be almost no work at all and yet it will pay huge dividends when your coworkers (or you after a few days) attempt to read through your code.  I know that this is merely a small fraction of the rules of any real style guide, but I think if everybody did just these few things we would be well on our way to coding utopia.