coding standards...

Oooooofda.  The last few days I've been reading through some code that I found on SourceForge...and my initial impressions are that it's horrible.  It doesn't seem that anyone has implimented any standards of any sort to how code was to be added.  It really looks like 50 different people added random bits of code to this project...and the scary part is that it actually works...it's just impossible to read.

There's no commenting of any sort, everything is all static based, when there are several places where instances would make more sense...every class's members are being referenced directly instead of using a property to expose them, and the list goes on and on...

This is a project I kinda wanted to get involved in...but I'm a little scared now.  I don't know if I wanna take part in something that's so disorganized.  Heh, at the very least it's made me appricated the quality of coding that goes on in my team at work.  :)  Now that I've read through some really really bad code...I think the code my team produces totally rocks.

Comments

• Anonymous
  July 14, 2005
  You could always go for the typical 'Open Source' mentality of "if you don’t like what's already out there... build your own!"
• Anonymous
  July 14, 2005
  I sympathise entirely. However I can't help but point out the irony that you complain that nobody has 'implimented any standards'. It would appear that you haven't either, having managed to spell 'implemented' wrongly! :)
• Anonymous
  July 14, 2005
  I actually was thinking about building my own, but I wanted to get some exprience first before giving it a shot. I've been noticing with my other side projects that I tend to have a great start and get a lot of stuff done, until I get to a point where I'm not sure about something, then I kinda loose steam as I get busy with something I do know about.
  
  I think there's some merit to working on a project where I don't know exactly what the end result should look like, but the only good thing about it is that I'm getting experience in my particular set of coding standards, and not actually learning anything. It's like practicing guitar. Sure I'll learn how to play a really cool riff and eventually I'll be able to play it rock solid and fast, but the beauty of the riff would elude me until I could hear it in context with the rest of the song.
  
  Anyway, what I decided to do to combat this was try to get involved in someone elses project that's similar to what I'd like to do. That way I could benefit from the lessons they learned, learn why certain things are being done in a certain way, etc...
  
  So I'm cleaning up the code I found while getting a grasp on how it works, compile a list of questions about things that confuse me, and then see if I can join in and help them out. Hopefully it'll work out.
  
  Oh, and opps about the spelling error...I'm very poor at spelling. :)
• Anonymous
  July 14, 2005
  I use sourceforge or any other open source project as a starting point.
  For some reason the project/code I look at ALWAYS does not perform exactly what I want. I always end up creating my one project, but steal some ideas/code from those projects.
  
• Anonymous
  July 14, 2005
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  July 14, 2005
  "wrongly"
  
  NOT A WORD
  
  I remember something about people in glass houses...
• Anonymous
  July 15, 2005
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  May 31, 2009
  PingBack from http://portablegreenhousesite.info/story.php?id=12724