Kindergarten Handwriting
07 Feb 2019When I was young I had horrendous handwriting. I would not be surprised if thousands of years from now, archaeologists discover my kindergarten notebooks and believe that I derived a new language from English. Kids are expected to have illegible handwriting so I tried not to worry about it, until I noticed a disturbing trend in my math classes. All my answers were right, but my work was impossible to follow and my handwriting was only decipherable by myself. So I got all the problems wrong. I remember being outraged, which of course was cute because I was 2 feet tall (which happens to be the height I am now) with chubby cheeks and pigtails. My kindergarten teacher taught me early on, it doesn’t matter if you get the work right. If no one can understand it, it’s wrong.
Coding standards are basically guidelines to help programmers write legibly. And just like with my math classes in my early childhood, I detest them with a malice so intense that the room gets 15 degrees hotter every time I think about it. I know, just like my first grade teacher said, “If no one can understand it, it’s wrong”, and adhering to a standard makes it so that other programmers can understand my work. That still won’t stop me from hating it any less. I will still attempt to follow them and I hope it gets better just like I did in first grade. But in the meantime, I will do so begrudgingly.
I believe that the root of my contempt stems from my innate laziness that I like to rebrand as a preference for efficiency. In fact, my nature may describe the majority of programmers. Why else would we pursue a career based on telling other things what to do so we don’t have to do it ourselves? By the basis of a preference for efficiency, I contest that having to revise code multiple times to meet a standard is a waste of my time. But could the truly efficient answer to my problem be to just write code in standard the first time? Who knows. I sure don’t.