Question

I really don’t know it this question fits stackoverflow and so sorry if it doesn’t. I will really appreciate it if you let me know where should I ask such Qs.

Working in an small company as head of development, this always annoys me:

How much should I insists on “Coding Style”, “Naming Conventions” and “Documenting the Code”?

As far as know (and learned), programmers really HATE being reminded about these things, specially documenting. But, on the other hand, these are really essential in lots of ways.

Answer 1

How much should I…

Much.

Not too much, but enough. Coding style and naming conventions are an important part of the quality of the code a programmer writes. If I were to employ programmers, and there were two candidates having written the following code snippets:

One:

int main(int argc,char*argv[]){
int a=atoi(argv[1]);
int b=atoi(argv[2]);
printf("%d+%d=%d\n",a,b,a+b);
return(0);
}

Two:

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    int a = atoi(argv[1]);
    int b = atoi(argv[2]);
    printf("%d + %d = %d\n", a, b, a+b);
    return 0;
}

I would choose the second one for sure.

Documentation? That’s very important also. Code should be properly documented – I mean, the documentation must be clean, concise, written using good English (“diz funktion iz calculate teh sum of two params” is unacceptable!) but it should also not be too long – good code is readable and self-explanatory.