Part of my Software Engineering curriculum requires that code submissions follow the ES6 javascript standard. I noticed that IntelliJ constantly flagged parts of my code with linting warnings and errors. At the moment, I feel that using ESlint is unnecessary because I am developing software on my own. However, I understand that as I start to work in larger teams, writing standardized code will become more important.
Everybody has their own coding style. If there was a team of 5 people who all wrote code without standards, a trained eye could possibly spot which developer wrote which parts of the software. I believe that code submitted by all collaborators should be almost indistinguishable. It will remove the need for all developers on the team to learn each other’s style. This could save a lot of time in the rapid development phase of the project. ESLint also has a feature to automatically fix all the linting errors on file saves. This makes using ESLint almost unnoticeable which is a good thing since my workflow does not feel any different from before.
Although it seems like a bit of extra work for little gain at the moment. I believe that getting used to these standards will help a lot in the future. Tools such as ESLint does all the heavy lifting for finding any linting errors in my software. Overall, I think that enforcing coding standards are helpful especially in larger teams where people often need to review each other’s code. It seemed a bit overboard at first but I do see the purpose for these tools and I will continue to use them.