This month, Mala Mahadevan (b | t) asked us to write about our view on coding standards. For those who check the dates, yes I’m very late.
Whenever I’m teaching a class on the basics of SQL, I’m showing my standard. I’m telling explicitly that this is my standard and by no means the best they’ll ever find. In fact, I’ll encourage everyone to develop their own standard.
Some people are willing to climb a hill and die on it defending their own standard. As Hugo Kornelis pointed out in his blog, that’s all fun and games when among friends in a nice setting, things change when it’s online. Personally, I’m not willing to die on that hill fighting my standard. If your standard works for you, great! If it doesn’t and you want advice, I’ll happily give it to you. And we can discuss the pros and cons and if you make a fair point, I might even change my own standard. But I won’t fight over it. There are many, many way more important things to fight over than indentation, leading commas, naming views and aliasing.
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