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How My IDE Influences My Coding
Let the tools help you, and forgo the old coding mentality
Not everyone agrees that the way we code should be influenced by IDE. I can understand where that comes from and agree that total reliance on specific tools for the work is not ideal. Nonetheless, I can’t deny how tools have influenced the way I code, just as Vim and Emacs have for some other people.
No Need for Perfect Code Organization at the Start
I remember those days before we start a project: meeting after meeting and document after document to discuss what the ideal code organization should be for a new project. Predicting how the project will evolve. All because we want to avoid future changes to the code base because changing it later will be difficult.
With IDE, we can easily move classes around and rename them, and the code will be auto-refactored all together, with little hassle for the developer searching around and manually changing it.
With the ability to make changes more easily, we can now not worry too much that our initial structure is not ideal, the name is not good enough, etc., nor be concerned that it’s future-proof, since no one knows the future anyway. Changes later are no longer that daunting a task.
Having said this, I have to state that some due diligence is required for code to be reasonably structured with names as meaningful as possible. There’s never an excuse to neglect that. It’s just that now we can avoid paranoia over the initial design to be put in place so we can have faster initial delivery.
Coding Review Focus on Semantics Instead of Syntax
When I first worked in a software organization, we did code review in a room. We printed the code out and read it to find misalignments of code per the coding guide. I usually looked for things like unused import, wrong { starting point, using spaces instead of tab, etc. (not aligned indentation).
