Playing well with others (Score 1)

I'm one of those people who is obsessed with coding style, but I'm not in love with any one style (well, I have my personal style but it changes over time). The main reason I like a style is to "play well with others".

In my job, we have (relatively) brisk turnover as people are brought into the project and moved out. The team size has gone from 2 to 30 and down to 8. People come and people go, but someone has to maintain the code for 20+ years. Having everything consistent makes it easier to bring people in and to keep things flowing easily.

During code reviews (we have them for every check-in), I consider deviating from the coding standard with justification to be wrong. Yes, it is nit-picky that the formatting is off or there is a missing space after the "if" and before the "(", but the simple fact we're working on a codebase that will be maintained by dozens of people over decades. A little work now significantly reduces the effort to maintain it later.

Now, that isn't to say that some standards drive me nuts. We use "m_" in front of our local variables at my current job. I *hate* it, but it is better than nothing. I'd rather go through the regular change process to get consensus instead of abandoning it because of a personal reason. Likewise, I've submitted patches to Mono previous, though I find their coding standards to be... uncomfortable to work with.

In the end, I only care that a standard is in place, not the specifics of it.