Linting With ESLint: A Process

20 Sep 2023

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Are Coding Standards Worth Following?

Coding standards are the unsung heroes of software development. While they may not be appreciated for what they are, coding standards help us maintain and create clean, readable code. This week, our class moved from JSFiddle, a rather simple development environment with limited scope, meant for only small snippets of code and quick projects, to Intellij, which is a very complex and robust IDE offering a wide variety of tools and code analysis features. This was a very drastic change, and while Intellij is a great IDE, it comes with the drawback of being very overwhelming in all of its possibilities.

Experience With ESLint

A large part of that big change was implementing ESLint, a code analysis tool which can automatically check that your code meets certain requirements and standards. ESLint is an extremely useful analysis tool, but it can sometimes be quite tedious to constantly be chasing the “green checkmark,” which means that all of your code is up to ESLint standard. For example, camel case is the preferred format for ESLint, but I am already accustomed to writing my variables in snake case. While this is just a small part of what ESLint checks for, I find it sometimes annoying to constantly be changing my variables to meet ESLint standards. However, overall, the suggestions ESLint makes is very helpful and oftentimes I much prefer the way my code looks after I finally get the green checkmark as opposed to before.

Final Thoughts

While I may find it mildly annoying in the moment, coding standards are an important concept to follow and I firmly believe that ESLint or similar code analysis tools should be the standard and always be installed in your IDE, whether or not you’re a beginning programmer or an experienced developer.