Gaming Horror – it's a Game Dev's Life

Coders working in a team environment should follow a set of commonly accepted Coding Guidelines. A lot of the issues have been heavily discussed over the years, some of it highly emotional, especially the subjective matters like where to put brackets. A lot of the issues are still heavily debated today but at lot has changed over the last two decades making a lot of these points moot – but they still crop up here and there.

So while i was looking for C# Coding Guidelines to find a good template for our Guidelines i came across the Mono C# Coding Guidelines. I have to disagree with most of what is said in there and even if i don’t have a clear preference on some parts i do notice a complete absence of reasoning for why the Mono team is doing it this way and not another. Also not a good way to present a Coding Guideline is in Mono’s simple “this is good, this is bad” examples style especially if there’s no rationale added to it. And worse, if the rationale is an extremely old argument “precious space” to implement a questionable “coding trick” even if it is coming from Linus Torvalds i seriously have to question their motives for compiling their Coding Guideline in the first place.

It seems to me that the Mono Coding Guideline is to implement the subjective preferences of one or more team members’ way how to layout your code – where to put spaces, brackets, etc. – and is even inconsistent in doing so. It completely misses the point of what a Coding Guideline should do – explain why we prefer one thing over another and while acknowledging to agree on a commonly accepted code layout or how to document it it is so much more important to write down what to do and what not and what kind of common issues we avoid by doing so.