Ever since I started learning and practicing programming in a classroom setting, coding standards were enforced with an iron first by the teachers. At first I would think, “this is ridiculous! Why would anyone care how my code looks as long as it does its job?”. I would neglect any of the advice from my teachers to adopt a uniform coding style and proceeded to type out lines and lines of ugly and hard to understand code. This, however, was not in my best interest as I soon found myself stuck on a particular chunk of code that threw dozens of errors whenever I tried to run it. When I had my teacher come look at it, she was unable to even make out what I was trying to do, since my program did not follow a coding standard. I eventually had to start over from scratch and implement the coding standard that the teacher had been promoting for months prior.
As we can see from my unfortunate high school experience, coding standards are meant to ease the pain of looking at someone else’s code. Furthermore, in college, I found it helpful to follow my professor’s coding standards since it involved an organized and structured style that would help myself be able to understand what i was writing, which was helpful especially when learning a new language. When learning a new language, whether in programming or even a spoken world language, it is hard to fight the urge to just spew out words you know in an unorganized manner. It is important, though, to take your time and follow the rules in structure, so that you may be able to understand what exactly you are saying and communicating with your audience, whether it may be a native speaker of a foreign language, or a computer.
Therefore, I tell all my fellow coding standard strugglers to embrace the pain and understand that the coding standard is here to be your friend and to aid us in our journey to be better programmers.