Tweet

Following in Jen's footsteps on her recent rant about dropdown menus, it's time I got something off my chest about programming styles and standards. There are many levels of coding standards. But the one I'm on a tear about today involves writing Joomla! 1.5 extensions.

I was asked to look into an issue regarding an extension we are using here at 4Web. This is the first time I've looked into the code and I was pretty disappointed at what I saw. One of the reasons I so love writing extensions for J!15 is because the core team has done what I consider a fabulous job of creating a flexible, organized, easily understandable (even by me!) extremely extensible structure and API for creating components, plugins and modules. It has been rare (and increasingly so) in my thirty eight years of experience to find code this well structured.

Programming is, or can be, an art. We each have a style and an approach to coding unique to ourselves. And if we're paying attention, our own style evolves. Heck, half the time I look at code I wrote five years ago and can't figure what in the world I was thinking. Looking at someone else's code can be a nightmare of galactic proportion. This creates difficulties in maintaining code and is one reason standards have come to be seen as important in some circles.

If we could follow some reasonably defined standards, perhaps it would minimize this maintainability problem.