What was the strangest coding standard rule that you were forced to follow

Question

When I asked this question I got almost always a definite yes you should have coding standards    What was the strangest coding standard rule that you were ever forced to follow   And by strangest I mean funniest  or worst  or just plain odd    In each answer  please mention which language  what your team size was  and which ill effects it caused you and your team

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All documents in my company are version-controlled. So far, so good.

But for EVERY single file, upon first committing to CVS, you must immediately add two tags to it: CRE (for CREation) and DEV001 (for 1st DEVelopment cycle). As if it being the first version of the file itself wasn't enough.

After that, the process gets a bit more reasonable, fortunately.

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Postfixing   to member variables  e g   int numberofCycles     This was in C   on an open source project with a couple of developers  The main side effect was not knowing that a variable had class scope until getting to the end of the name  Not something I had thought much about before  but clearly backwards

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I absolutely hate it when someone doesn t use a naming convention  At where I worked  the lead developer  who I replaced  couldn t figure out if he wanted to use camelCase  or way over used underscores  Personally  I hate the underscores and the camel case is easier to read  but it doesn t really matter as long as you keep to one standard   PHP is especially bad at this  take a look at mysql numrows which merges the two without the caps

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I once worked on a VB NET project where every method body was wrapped in the following Try   Catch block   Public Sub MyMethod       Try           Whatever     Catch Ex As Exception         Throw New Exception  MyClass  MyMethod      Ex ToString        End Try End Sub   Those who do not understand Exception StackTrace are doomed to reinvent it  badly

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A buddy of mine encountered this rule while working at a government job   The use of     pre or post  was completely banned   The reason  Different compilers might interpret it differently

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Not quite a coding standard  but in 1998 I worked for a company where C   was banned  in favour of C  This was because OO was considered too complex for the software engineers to grasp   In our C code we were required to prefix all semi-colons with a space  int someInt   5     I could never find out a reason for this  but after a while it did grow on me

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I ve had a lot of stupid rules  but not a lot that I considered downright strange   The sillyiest was on a NASA job I worked back in the early 90 s  This was a huge job  with well over 100 developers on it  The experienced developers who wrote the coding standards decided that every source file should begin with a four letter acronym  and the first letter had to stand for the group that was responsible for the file  This was probably a great idea for the old FORTRAN 77 projects they were used to    However  this was an Ada project  with a nice hierarchal library structure  so it made no sense at all  Every directory was full of files starting with the same letter  followed by 3 more nonsense leters  an underscore  and then part of the file name that mattered  All the Ada packages had to start with this same five-character wart  Ada  use  clauses were not allowed either  arguably a good thing under normal circumstances   so that meant any reference to any identifier that wasn t local to that source file also had to include this useless wart  There probably should have been an insurrection over this  but the entire project was staffed by junior programmers and fresh from college new hires  myself being the latter    A typical assignment statement  already verbose in Ada  would end up looking something like this   NABC The Package Name X    NABC The Package Name X      CXYZ Some Other Package Name Delta X    Fortunately they were at least enlightened enough to allow us more than 80 columns  Still  the facility wart was hated enough that it became boilerplate code at the top of everyone s source files to use Ada  renames  to get rid of the wart  There d be one rename for each imported   withed   package  Like this   package Package Name renames NABC Package Name  package Some Other Package Name renames CXYZ Some Other Package Name  --   Repeated in this vein for an average of 10 lines or so   What the more creative among us took to doing was trying to use the wart to make an acutally sensible  or silly  package name   I know what you are thinking  but explitives were not allowed and shame on you  That s disgusting   For example  I was in the Common code group  and I needed to make a package to interface with the Workstation group  After a brainstorming session with the Workstation guy  we decided to name our packages so that someone needing both would have to write   with CANT Interface Package  with WONT Interface Package

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Forbidden   while  true      Allowed   for

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It was a coding standard I did not follow myself   got in trouble for other things  but never that    We had three 19  monitors  so we could have two editors open to full screen and still have access to the desktop  Everyone else did not use comments  but used meaningful names  Extremely long meaningful names  The longest I remember was in the 80 character range  The average was around 40 50   Guess what  they didn t accurately describe the whole thing

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Using generic numbered identifier names At my current work we have two rules which are really mean  Rule 1  Every time we create a new field in a database table we have to add additional reserve fields for future use  These reserve fields are numbered  because no one knows which data they will hold some day  The next time we need a new field we first look for an unused reserve field  So we end up with with customer reserve field 14 containing the e-mail address of the customer  At one day our boss thought about introducing reserve tables  but fortunatly we could convince him not to do it  Rule 2  One of our products is written in VB6 and VB6 has a limit of the total count of different identifier names and since the code is very large  we constantly run into this limit  As a  quot solution quot  all local variable names are numbered   Lvarlong1 Lvarlong2 Lvarstr1      Although that effectively circumvents the identifier limit  these two rules combined lead to beautiful code like this        If Lvarbool1 Then   Lvarbool2   True End If  If Lvarbool2 Or Lvarstr1  lt  gt  Lvarstr5 Then   db Execute  quot DELETE FROM customer WHERE  quot            amp   quot reserve field 12     quot   amp  Lvarstr1  amp   quot   quot   End If        You can imagine how hard it is to fix old or someone else s code    Latest update  Now we are also using  quot reserve procedures quot  for private members  Private Sub LSub1 Lvarlong1 As Long  Lvarstr1 As String    If Lvarlong1  gt   0 Then      Lvarbool1   LFunc1 Lvarstr1    Else     Lvarbool1   LFunc6     End If   If Lvarbool1 Then     LSub4 Lvarstr1   End If End Sub  EDIT  It seems that this code pattern is becoming more and more popular  See this The Daily WTF post to learn more  Astigmatism

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The worst is a nameless place I still earn money from  there are no standards  Every program is new adventure    Fortunately another contractor and I are slowly training the real employees and forcing some structure on the mess

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I worked in a place where the coding standard was one giant WTF  strange Hungarian notation  prefixing globals with  g  and members with  m   so there were gems like gsSomeVariable   adding  ref string sError  to every single function  instead of throwing exceptions  which was a BIG nono     The killer  though  was prefixing the function parameters with I  for input parameters  and O  for output parameters   I work now in a much better place

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having to put m  prefix on java instance variables and g  prefix on java static variables  most un-Java idiot cruft I have ever had to deal with  perpetuated by C and C   developers that didn t know how to use anything other than notepad to develop Java with    except that nobody actually followed this except to put m  on everything even statics even method names

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The worst I ve experienced was to do with code inspections   For some reason even though we had and used the diff tool of our vcs to see what had changed  when you wanted your code inspected you had to surround your changes in a file function with some comment blocks like so                80charswide          START INSPECT       some changed code             END INSPECT               80charswide           After the inspection you d have to go back and remove all those comment blocks before committing   ugh

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I hate it when the use of multiple returns is banned

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Adding an 80 character comment at the end of each method so it is easy to find the end of the method   Like this   void doSomething         ----------------------------------------------------------------------------   The rationale being that    some users don t use IDE s that have code folding  Ok I will give them that   a space between methods is not clear since people may not follow the other coding standards about indenting and brace placement  hence it would be hard to find the end of a function    Not releavent  if you need to add this because people don t follow your coding standard then why should they follow this one

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Maybe not the most outlandish one you ll get  but I really really hate when I have to preface database table names with  tbl

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No Hungarian whatsoever   OK  you re thinking this is bad why  Well  because they considered this to be Hungarian   int foo  int  pFoo  int   hFoo   Now  any old-school Mac programmer will remember dealing with Handles and Ptrs  The above is the easiest way to tell them apart - Apple sample code is full of it  and Apple was hardly a hotbed of Hungarianism  And so when I had to write some old-school Mac code  naturally I did that  and got it shot down for being Hungarian   But nobody could propose an alternate naming scheme that preserved the clarity of three variables referring to the same data in different ways  so I checked it in as-is

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Once worked on a project where underscores were banned   And I mean totally banned   So in a c  winforms app  whenever we added a new event handler  e g  for a button  we d have to  rename the default method name from buttonName Click   to something else  just to satisfy the ego of the guy that wrote the coding standards   To this day I don t know what he had against the humble underscore

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When I started working at one place  and started entering my code into the source control  my boss suddenly came up to me  and asked me to stop committing so much  He told me it is discouraged to do more than 1 commit per-day for a developer because it litters the source control  I simply gaped at him     Later I understood that the reason he even came up to me about it is because the SVN server would send him  and 10 more high executives  a mail for each commit someone makes  And by littering the source control I guessed he ment his mailbox

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Totally useless database naming conventions  Every table name has to start with a number  The numbers show which kind of data is in the table    0  data that is used everywhere 1  data that is used by a certain module only 2  lookup table 3  calendar  chat and mail 4  logging   This makes it hard to find a table if you only know the first letter of its name  Also - as this is a mssql database - we have to surround tablenames with square brackets everywhere   -- doesn t work select   from 0examples   -- does work select   from  0examples

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Capitalizing Acronyms  DO capitalize both characters of two-character acronyms except the first word of a camel-cased identifier   System IO public void StartIO Stream ioStream    DO capitalize only the first character of acronyms with three or more characters except the first word of a camel-cased identifier   System Xml public void ProcessHtmlTag string htmlTag    DO NOT capitalize any of the characters of any acronyms  whatever their length  at the beginning of a camel-cased identifier

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I hate it when the use of multiple returns is banned

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Being forced to have only 1 return statement at the end of a method and making the code fall down to that   Also not being able to re-use case statements in a switch and let it drop through  I had to write a convoluted script that did a sort of loop of the switch to handle both cases in the right order   Lastly  when I started using C  I found it very odd to declare my variables at the top of a method and absolutely hated it  I d spent a good couple of years in C   and just declared them wherever I wanted  Unless for optimisation reasons I now declare all method variables at the top of a method with details of what they all do - makes maintenance A LOT easier

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The last place I worked was primarily a C   shop  and before I was hired my boss  who was the director of research and development  had issued a decree that  dynamic memory allocation is not allowed   No  new   not even a  malloc  -- because  those can lead to memory leaks if a developer forgets the corresponding delete free operation   As a corollary to this particular rule   pointers are also not allowed   although references were totally acceptable  being both awesome and safe    I repealed those rules  as opposed to  say  rewriting all our software in other languages  but I did have to add a few awesome rules of my own  like  you may not launch a new thread without written approval from someone qualified to do that sort of thing  based on an unfortunate series of code reviews  sigh

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If I remember correctly the delphi IDE did a default indent of two spaces   Most of the legacy code for the company had three spaces and was written by the VP IT and the CEO   One day  all the programmers were talking about what we should do to make our lives easier and a contractor who knew Delphi pretty well said   Hey the ide defaults to two spaces does anyone have a problem with us doing this going forward for new code    All of us looked at each other  and pretty much thought it was a no brainer and said that we agreed     Two days later the VP and CEO found out we were going to make such a dangerous change that could  cause problems  and instructed us that we would be using three indents for everything until the two of them could accurately evaluate the impact of such a change   Now I am all for following standards  but these are the same people who thought oo programming was creating an object with one function that had all of the logic necessary to perform an action  and that source control was moving the code files to a different directory

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Use   or m  in front of global variable when you can simply use the keyword this  when you need to access global variable

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Applying s  to variables and methods which were deemed  safety critical  for software that was part of a control system   Couple this with the other rule about putting m  on the front of member variables and you d get something ridiculous like  s m blah     which is darn annoying to write and not very readable in my opinion   In the end some  safety expert  was supposed to gain insight by looking at the code and determining something from it by using those  s   - in practice  they didn t know c   too well so they couldn t do much other than make reports on the number of identifiers that we d marked as  safety critical    Utter nonsense

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Prefix tables with dbo   Yes  as in dbo dbo tablename

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Writing methods comments with pointless information for almost all methods   Not allowing multiple exit points from a method   Hungarian notation for all variables  enums  structures and even classes  e g  iMyInt  tagMySturcture  eMyEnum and CMyClass

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SCORM for sure   http   en wikipedia org wiki SCORM

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Once I had to do a little DLL out of my team and when it was done I had to redo the job because I shouldn t have had used  else  in the code  When I asked why I was instructed not to ask why  but the leader of the other team just  didn t get the else stuff

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Not being able to use Reflection as the manager claimed it involved too much  magic

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The first programming job I had was with a Microsoft QuickBASIC 4 5 shop   The lead developer had been working in BASIC just about forever  so most of the advanced     features of QuickBASIC were off-limits because they were new and he didn t understand them   So    No Sub End Sub procedures   Everything was done with GOSUB We were allowed to not number lines that weren t the target of GOTO or GOSUB  But GOTO targets has to be a numeric label  not a name  Targets of GOSUB were allowed to be named  but the name had to prefixed by  S  and a four digit number   All subroutines had to have the four digit number sorted in order in the source file   So a typical routine might be S1135InitializePrinter   You d have to go and find the right routine to get the number  there were enough that you couldn t hope to remember them all  No block IF END IF  All IFs had to have either a single GOTO or GOSUB as the conditional statement    That was a really fun job   No  seriously

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I completly disagree with this one  but I was forced to follow it   All HTML LINKS will ALWAYS be underlined   A while back I explained why I disagree on my blog   Note  Even Stackoverflow ONLY underlines links when you move the mouse over them

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Doing all database queries via stored procedures in Sql Server 2000  From complex multi-table queries to simple ones like   select id  name from people  The arguments in favor of procedures were    Performance Security Maintainability   I know that the procedure topic is quite controversial  so feel free to score my answer negatively

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The strangest was that type qualified variable naming must be used in Java  and the types where those of the columns from the database   So a java sql ResultSet had to be called tblClient etc

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In C    we had to write explicitly everything that the compiler is supposed to write for us  default constructor  destructor  copy constructor  copy assignment operator  for every class   Looks like whoever wrote the standards was not very confident on the language

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I once had to spell out all acronyms  even industry standard ones such as OpenGL  Variable names such as glu were not good  but we had to use graphicsLibraryUtility

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Our Oracle DBA s are insisting that we prepend the schema name onto table names  ie if your schema is hr admin  your staff table would be hr admin staff  meaning the full name of the table in a cross schema query would be hr admin hr admin staff

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To NEVER remove any code when making changes   We were told to comment all changes   Bear in mind we use source control   This policy didn t last long because developers were in an uproar about it and how it would make the code unreadable

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There must be 165 unit tests  not necessarily automated  per 1000 lines of code   That works out at one test for roughly every 8 lines     Needless to say  some of the lines of code are quite long  and functions return this pointers to allow chaining

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At the place I m currently working  the official coding standard stipulates a maximum line length of eighty characters  The rational was to enable hard-copies of the code to be formatted  Needless to say  this led to very odd code layout  I ve worked to eliminate this standard  mainly through the argument of  when was the last time you made a hard-copy of code   Readability now versus chance of making a hard-copy on an eighty column DMP   Skizz

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I completly disagree with this one  but I was forced to follow it   All HTML LINKS will ALWAYS be underlined   A while back I explained why I disagree on my blog   Note  Even Stackoverflow ONLY underlines links when you move the mouse over them

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We were doing a C   project and the team lead was a Pascal guy   So we had a coding standard include file to redefine all that pesky C and C   syntax    define BEGIN    define END     but wait there s more    define ENDIF    define CASE switch   etc    It s hard to remember after all this time   This took what would have been perfectly readable C   code and made it illegible to anyone except the team lead   We also had to use reverse Hungarian notation  i e   MyClass  class pt     pt   pointer to type  UINT32 maxHops u      u   uint32   although oddly I grew to like this

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What drives me nuts is people suffixing the ID field of a table with the name of the table  What the hell is wrong with just ID  You re going to have to alias it anyway    for the love of all that is sacred   Imagine what your SQL statements look like when you ve got id fields called IDSEWEBLASTCUSTOMERACTION and IDSEEVENTLOGGER

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This isn t a coding standard issue  but is surely a tale of restrictive thinking   We had completed a short 4 week project in no less than 7 weeks   The schedule was loosely based on guestimating a feature list   The development process consisted of coding furiously   During the postmortem I suggested using milestones and breaking feature requests into tasks   Incredibly  my director dismissed my ideas  saying that because it was such a short project  we didn t need to use milestones or tasks  and asked for other suggestions   The room fell silent   Language   Java  C    HTML Team size   Two teams  totaling 10 engineers Which ill effects it caused you and your team  I felt like I was caught in a Dilbert cartoon

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Once worked on a project where underscores were banned   And I mean totally banned   So in a c  winforms app  whenever we added a new event handler  e g  for a button  we d have to  rename the default method name from buttonName Click   to something else  just to satisfy the ego of the guy that wrote the coding standards   To this day I don t know what he had against the humble underscore

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All file names must be in lower case

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In Java  I am currently discouraged to use boolean functions as a predicate in a test        if  list isEmpty          must be rewritten       if  list isEmpty      true        and       if   list isEmpty          must be rewritten       if  list isEmpty      false        because  it is clearer like that    To me   list isEmpty      true  has 2 verbs   is  and  equals   in one phrase without a connective   I can t make it feel right

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Wow -- this brings back so many memories of one particular place that I worked   Arizona Department of Transportation     There was a project manager there that didn t understand object-based programming  and didn t want to understand it    She was convinced that object-based programming was a fad  and refused to let anybody check-in code that used any kind of object based programming      Seriously -- she actually spent a lot of her day reviewing code that we had checked-in to Visual SourceSafe just to make sure we weren t breaking the rules      Considering Visual Basic 4 had just released  this was about 12 years ago   and considering that the Windows forms application we were building in VB4 used objects to describe the forms  this made development     complicated     A buddy of mine actually tried to get around this problem by encapsulating his  object code  inside dummy  forms  and she eventually caught on that he was just    gasp    hiding his objects   Needless to say  I only lasted about 3 months there     Gosh  I disliked that woman s thinking

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a friend of mine - we ll call him CodeMonkey - got his first job out of college  many years ago  doing in-house development in COBOL  His first program was rejected as  not complying with our standards  because it used     shudder   nested IF statements  the coding standards banned the use of nested IF statements  now  CodeMonkey was not shy and was certain of his abilities  so he persisted in asking everyone up the chain and down the aisle why this rule existed  Most claimed they did not know  some made up stuff about  readability   and finally one person remembered the original reason  the first version of the COBOL compiler they used had a bug and didn t handle nested IF statements correctly   This compiler bug  of course  had been fixed for at least a decade  but no one had challenged the standards   baaa    CodeMonkey was successful in getting the standards changed - eventually

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As I always worked self-employed freelancer project leader  I never got into someone s standards  all standards are my decisions  But  I recently found a fun piece of  coding standards document  back when I was 15   All functions must be named  ProjectName FunctionName    Well  procedural PHP  anyone  Those weren t times of hard PHP OOP yet  but still  If I wanted to use code from one project to another  I would have to rewrite all references  etc   I could have used something like  package FunctionName

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No Hungarian whatsoever   OK  you re thinking this is bad why  Well  because they considered this to be Hungarian   int foo  int  pFoo  int   hFoo   Now  any old-school Mac programmer will remember dealing with Handles and Ptrs  The above is the easiest way to tell them apart - Apple sample code is full of it  and Apple was hardly a hotbed of Hungarianism  And so when I had to write some old-school Mac code  naturally I did that  and got it shot down for being Hungarian   But nobody could propose an alternate naming scheme that preserved the clarity of three variables referring to the same data in different ways  so I checked it in as-is

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The very strangest one I had  and one which took me quite some time to overthrow  was when the owner of our company demanded that our new product be IE only   If it could work on FireFox  that was OK  but it had to be IE only   This might not sound too strange  except for one little flaw   All of the software was for a bespoke server software package  running on Linux  and all client boxes that our customer was buying were Linux   Short of trying to figure out how to get Wine  in those days  very unreliable  up and running on all of these boxes and seeing if we could get IE running and training their admins how to debug Wine problems  it simply wasn t possible to meet the owner s request   The problem was that he was doing the Web design and simply didn t know how to make Web sites compliant with FireFox   It probably won t shock you to know that that our company went bankrupt

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Not being allowed to use Pointers or GOTO   In C  none-the-less    Thankfully this was merely a  software engineering  class  which I was able to graduate and then enter the  real world

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No ternary operator allowed where I currently work   int value    a  lt  b    a   b        because not everyone  gets it   If you told me   Don t use it because we ve had to rewrite them when the structures get too complicated   nested ternary operators  anyone    then I d understand  But when you tell me that some developers don t understand them    um    Sure

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Back in the 80 s 90 s  I worked for an aircraft simulator company that used FORTRAN  Our FORTRAN compiler had a limit of 8 characters for variable names  The company s coding standards reserved the first three of them for Hungarian-notation style info  So we had to try and create meaningful variable names with just 5 characters

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What drives me nuts is people suffixing the ID field of a table with the name of the table  What the hell is wrong with just ID  You re going to have to alias it anyway    for the love of all that is sacred   Imagine what your SQL statements look like when you ve got id fields called IDSEWEBLASTCUSTOMERACTION and IDSEEVENTLOGGER

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Every beginning and ending brace was required to have a comment    public void HelloWorld string name       if name     Joe           Console WriteLine  Hey  Joe           if name     Joe     else         Console WriteLine  Hello      name         if name     Joe       public void HelloWorld string name    That s what led me to write my first Visual Studio plugin to automate that

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Prefix tables with dbo   Yes  as in dbo dbo tablename

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Postfixing   to member variables  e g   int numberofCycles     This was in C   on an open source project with a couple of developers  The main side effect was not knowing that a variable had class scope until getting to the end of the name  Not something I had thought much about before  but clearly backwards

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I ve had a lot of stupid rules  but not a lot that I considered downright strange   The sillyiest was on a NASA job I worked back in the early 90 s  This was a huge job  with well over 100 developers on it  The experienced developers who wrote the coding standards decided that every source file should begin with a four letter acronym  and the first letter had to stand for the group that was responsible for the file  This was probably a great idea for the old FORTRAN 77 projects they were used to    However  this was an Ada project  with a nice hierarchal library structure  so it made no sense at all  Every directory was full of files starting with the same letter  followed by 3 more nonsense leters  an underscore  and then part of the file name that mattered  All the Ada packages had to start with this same five-character wart  Ada  use  clauses were not allowed either  arguably a good thing under normal circumstances   so that meant any reference to any identifier that wasn t local to that source file also had to include this useless wart  There probably should have been an insurrection over this  but the entire project was staffed by junior programmers and fresh from college new hires  myself being the latter    A typical assignment statement  already verbose in Ada  would end up looking something like this   NABC The Package Name X    NABC The Package Name X      CXYZ Some Other Package Name Delta X    Fortunately they were at least enlightened enough to allow us more than 80 columns  Still  the facility wart was hated enough that it became boilerplate code at the top of everyone s source files to use Ada  renames  to get rid of the wart  There d be one rename for each imported   withed   package  Like this   package Package Name renames NABC Package Name  package Some Other Package Name renames CXYZ Some Other Package Name  --   Repeated in this vein for an average of 10 lines or so   What the more creative among us took to doing was trying to use the wart to make an acutally sensible  or silly  package name   I know what you are thinking  but explitives were not allowed and shame on you  That s disgusting   For example  I was in the Common code group  and I needed to make a package to interface with the Workstation group  After a brainstorming session with the Workstation guy  we decided to name our packages so that someone needing both would have to write   with CANT Interface Package  with WONT Interface Package

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We were doing a C   project and the team lead was a Pascal guy   So we had a coding standard include file to redefine all that pesky C and C   syntax    define BEGIN    define END     but wait there s more    define ENDIF    define CASE switch   etc    It s hard to remember after all this time   This took what would have been perfectly readable C   code and made it illegible to anyone except the team lead   We also had to use reverse Hungarian notation  i e   MyClass  class pt     pt   pointer to type  UINT32 maxHops u      u   uint32   although oddly I grew to like this

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The very strangest one I had  and one which took me quite some time to overthrow  was when the owner of our company demanded that our new product be IE only   If it could work on FireFox  that was OK  but it had to be IE only   This might not sound too strange  except for one little flaw   All of the software was for a bespoke server software package  running on Linux  and all client boxes that our customer was buying were Linux   Short of trying to figure out how to get Wine  in those days  very unreliable  up and running on all of these boxes and seeing if we could get IE running and training their admins how to debug Wine problems  it simply wasn t possible to meet the owner s request   The problem was that he was doing the Web design and simply didn t know how to make Web sites compliant with FireFox   It probably won t shock you to know that that our company went bankrupt

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I once had to spell out all acronyms  even industry standard ones such as OpenGL  Variable names such as glu were not good  but we had to use graphicsLibraryUtility

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I ran into two rules that I really hated on a C job a few years ago     One module per file   where  module  was defined as a C function  Function-local variables allowed only at the top of the function  so this sort of thing was illegal     if  test       int i

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Not quite a coding standard  but in 1998 I worked for a company where C   was banned  in favour of C  This was because OO was considered too complex for the software engineers to grasp   In our C code we were required to prefix all semi-colons with a space  int someInt   5     I could never find out a reason for this  but after a while it did grow on me

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While coding for a VB project I was asked to add the following comment section for each of the methods   Module Name  Module Description  Parameters and description of each parameter  Called by  Calls   While I found the rest quite alright but I was against the last two  the reason I argued was the as the project becomes large it will become difficult to maintain  If we are creating the library function then we can never be able to maintain Called by  We were small team of 6  so the argument made by manager was that since you are going to call the functions this should be maintained  Anyway I had to give up this argument as the manager was adamant  The result was as expected  as the project become larger no one cared to maintain Called by and Calls

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Using generic numbered identifier names At my current work we have two rules which are really mean  Rule 1  Every time we create a new field in a database table we have to add additional reserve fields for future use  These reserve fields are numbered  because no one knows which data they will hold some day  The next time we need a new field we first look for an unused reserve field  So we end up with with customer reserve field 14 containing the e-mail address of the customer  At one day our boss thought about introducing reserve tables  but fortunatly we could convince him not to do it  Rule 2  One of our products is written in VB6 and VB6 has a limit of the total count of different identifier names and since the code is very large  we constantly run into this limit  As a  quot solution quot  all local variable names are numbered   Lvarlong1 Lvarlong2 Lvarstr1      Although that effectively circumvents the identifier limit  these two rules combined lead to beautiful code like this        If Lvarbool1 Then   Lvarbool2   True End If  If Lvarbool2 Or Lvarstr1  lt  gt  Lvarstr5 Then   db Execute  quot DELETE FROM customer WHERE  quot            amp   quot reserve field 12     quot   amp  Lvarstr1  amp   quot   quot   End If        You can imagine how hard it is to fix old or someone else s code    Latest update  Now we are also using  quot reserve procedures quot  for private members  Private Sub LSub1 Lvarlong1 As Long  Lvarstr1 As String    If Lvarlong1  gt   0 Then      Lvarbool1   LFunc1 Lvarstr1    Else     Lvarbool1   LFunc6     End If   If Lvarbool1 Then     LSub4 Lvarstr1   End If End Sub  EDIT  It seems that this code pattern is becoming more and more popular  See this The Daily WTF post to learn more  Astigmatism

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The first language I used professionally was 4D  It supported interprocess variables prefixed by a  lt    process variables with no prefixes and local variables which started with a    All those prefixes  or lack thereof  are used by the compiler interpreter to determine the variable s scope    The actual strange coding standard was some sort of hungarian notation  The catch was that instead of naming variables based on their types  they had to be prefixed according to their scope    Variables  whose scope were determined by their prefix  had to be prefixed with redundant information   I don t dare ask the guy responsible for the standards why it had to be this way

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Being forced to have only 1 return statement at the end of a method and making the code fall down to that   Also not being able to re-use case statements in a switch and let it drop through  I had to write a convoluted script that did a sort of loop of the switch to handle both cases in the right order   Lastly  when I started using C  I found it very odd to declare my variables at the top of a method and absolutely hated it  I d spent a good couple of years in C   and just declared them wherever I wanted  Unless for optimisation reasons I now declare all method variables at the top of a method with details of what they all do - makes maintenance A LOT easier

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The strangest one i saw was database table naming where the tables were prefaced with a TLA for functional area  eg accounting ACC then a 3 digit number to  overide the default sort  and then the table name   Plus this was extended into the column names as well   ACC100 AccountCode  it was a nightmare to read a query  they were so unreadable

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Although this wasn t at a job  we had a massive project for a class in college   One of the requirements was commenting every line of code in our application -- regardless of what it did    and each line had to be specific e g   int x 0    declare variable x and assign it to 0   We weren t allowed to do this   int x  y  z   0    declare and assign to 0   As it wasn t detailed enough   And that s not even following the naming conventions forced upon us   Needless to say we spent a few hours going back through the code

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In my last job  my supervisor always enforced Murphy s Law    Anything that can go wrong will go wrong    I guess it was so we didn t slack off doing some quick fixes in the code or something like that  And now I constantly have that phrase in my head

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No ternary operator allowed where I currently work   int value    a  lt  b    a   b        because not everyone  gets it   If you told me   Don t use it because we ve had to rewrite them when the structures get too complicated   nested ternary operators  anyone    then I d understand  But when you tell me that some developers don t understand them    um    Sure

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Hungarian notation in general

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reverse indentation   For example       for int i   0  i  lt  10  i              myFunc                and       if something               do A               else              do B

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In Delphi we had to change from  if something then begin       end else begin      end    to  if something then begin       end else begin      end    in a project with 1 5 million lines of code  Imagine how easy this was on source control  diff  and merge  It also led to forgetting begin and not noticing it right away when the compiler announced a superflous end

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There must be 165 unit tests  not necessarily automated  per 1000 lines of code   That works out at one test for roughly every 8 lines     Needless to say  some of the lines of code are quite long  and functions return this pointers to allow chaining

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Back in the 80 s 90 s  I worked for an aircraft simulator company that used FORTRAN  Our FORTRAN compiler had a limit of 8 characters for variable names  The company s coding standards reserved the first three of them for Hungarian-notation style info  So we had to try and create meaningful variable names with just 5 characters

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Wow -- this brings back so many memories of one particular place that I worked   Arizona Department of Transportation     There was a project manager there that didn t understand object-based programming  and didn t want to understand it    She was convinced that object-based programming was a fad  and refused to let anybody check-in code that used any kind of object based programming      Seriously -- she actually spent a lot of her day reviewing code that we had checked-in to Visual SourceSafe just to make sure we weren t breaking the rules      Considering Visual Basic 4 had just released  this was about 12 years ago   and considering that the Windows forms application we were building in VB4 used objects to describe the forms  this made development     complicated     A buddy of mine actually tried to get around this problem by encapsulating his  object code  inside dummy  forms  and she eventually caught on that he was just    gasp    hiding his objects   Needless to say  I only lasted about 3 months there     Gosh  I disliked that woman s thinking

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My weirdest one was at a contract a couple years ago   ZombieSheep s weird one was part of it  but not the weirdest one in that company   No  the weirdest one in that company was the database naming scheme  Every table was named in all caps  with underscores between the words  Every table had a prefix  generally 1 - 6 characters  which was usually an acronym or an abbreviation of the main table name  Every field of the table was prefixed with the same prefix as well  So  let s say you have a simple schema where people can own cats or dogs  It d look like this   PER PERSON     PER ID     PER NameFirst     PER NameLast         CAT CAT     CAT ID     CAT Name     CAT Breed         DOG DOG     DOG ID     DOG Name     DOG Breed         PERCD PERSON CAT DOG  for the join data      PERCD ID     PERCD PER ID     PERCD CAT ID     PERCD DOG ID   That said  as weird as this felt initially     It grew on me  The reasons behind it made sense  after you wrapped your brain around it   as the prefixes were there to be reminders of  recommended   and enforced   table aliases when building joins  The prefixing made the majority of join queries easier to write  as it was very rare that you d have to explicitly reference a table before the field    Heck  after a while  all of us on the team  6 people on our project  were able to begin referring to tables in conversation by nothing more than the prefix  An acquired taste  to be sure     But one that grew on me  So much so that I still use it  when I have that freedom

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Not being able to use Reflection as the manager claimed it involved too much  magic

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In C    we had to write explicitly everything that the compiler is supposed to write for us  default constructor  destructor  copy constructor  copy assignment operator  for every class   Looks like whoever wrote the standards was not very confident on the language

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Perhaps one of the more frustrating situations I ve encountered was where people insisted on prefixing Stored Procedures with the prefix  sp       If you don t know why this is a bad thing to do  check out this blog entry here   In a nutshell  if SQL Server is looking for a Stored Procedure with an sp  prefix  it will check the master database first  which it won t find unless the SP is actually in the master database    Assuming it isn t in the master DB  SQL Server assumes the SP isn t in the cache and therefore recompiles it     It may sound like a small thing  but it adds up in high volume or busy database server environments

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Almost any kind of hungarian notation   The problem with hungarian notation is that it is very often misunderstood  The original idea was to prefix the variable so that the meaning was clear  For example   int appCount   0     Number of apples  int pearCount   0     Number of pears    But most people use it to determine the type   int iAppleCount   0     Number of apples  int iPearCount   0      Number of pears    This is confusing  because although both numbers are integers  everybody knows  you can t compare apples with pears

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You must use only five letter table names and the last two character is reserved for IO

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a friend of mine - we ll call him CodeMonkey - got his first job out of college  many years ago  doing in-house development in COBOL  His first program was rejected as  not complying with our standards  because it used     shudder   nested IF statements  the coding standards banned the use of nested IF statements  now  CodeMonkey was not shy and was certain of his abilities  so he persisted in asking everyone up the chain and down the aisle why this rule existed  Most claimed they did not know  some made up stuff about  readability   and finally one person remembered the original reason  the first version of the COBOL compiler they used had a bug and didn t handle nested IF statements correctly   This compiler bug  of course  had been fixed for at least a decade  but no one had challenged the standards   baaa    CodeMonkey was successful in getting the standards changed - eventually

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The team size was about a dozen   For C  methods we had to put a huge XML formatted function before every function   I don t remember the format exactly but it involved XML tags nested about three to five levels deep   Here s a sketch from memory of the comment        lt comment gt       lt  comment gt       lt table gt          lt thead gt             lt tcolumns gt                lt column gt Date lt  column gt                lt column gt Modified By lt  column gt                lt column gt Comment lt  column gt             lt  tcolumns gt          lt  thead gt          lt rows gt             lt row gt                lt column gt 10 10 2006 lt  column gt                lt column gt Fred lt  column gt                lt column gt Created function lt  column gt             lt  row gt          lt  rows gt       lt parameters gt    I ve got to stop there      The downsides were many    Files were made up mostly of comments    We were not using our version control system for tracking changes to files  Writing many small functions hurt readability  Lots of scrolling  Some people did not update the comments      I used a code snippet  Emacs YAS  to add this code to my methods

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I once worked under the tyranny of the Mighty VB King   The VB King was the pure master of MS Excel and VBA  as well as databases  Hence his surname   He played with Excel while the developers worked with compilers  and challenging him on databases could have detrimental effects on your career       Of course  his immense skills gave him an unique vision of development problems and project management solutions  While not exactly coding standards in the strictest sense  the VB King regularly had new ideas about  coding standards  and  best practices  he tried  and oftentimes succeeded  to impose on us  For example    All C C   arrays shall start at index 1  instead of 0  Indeed  the use of 0 as first index of an array is obsolete  and has been superseded by Visual Basic 6 s insightful array index management  All functions shall return an error code  There are no exceptions in VB6  so why would we need them at all   i e  in C    Since  All functions shall return an error code  is not practical for functions returning meaningful types  all functions shall have an error code as first  in out  parameter  All our code will check the error codes  this led to the worst case of VBScript if-indentation I ever saw in my career    Of course  as the  else  clauses were never handled  no error was actually found until too late   Since we re working with C   COM  starting this very day  we will code all our DOM utility functions in Visual Basic  ASP 115 errors are evil  For this reason  we will use On Error Resume Next in our VBScript ASP code to avoid them  XSL-T is an object oriented language  Use inheritance to resolve your problems  dumb surprise almost broke my jaw open this one day   Exceptions are not used  and thus should be removed  For this reason  we will uncheck the checkbox asking for destructor call in case of exception unwinding  it took days for an expert to find the cause of all those memory leaks  and he almost went berserk when he found out they had willingly ignored  and hidden  his technical note about checking the option again  sent handfuls of weeks before   catch all exceptions in the COM interface of our COM modules  and dispose them silently  this way  instead of crashing  a module would only appear to be faster    Shiny     As we used the   ber error handling described above  it even took us some time to understand what was really happening    You can t have both speed and correct results  can you    Starting today  our code base will split into four branches  We will manage their synchronization and integrate all bug corrections evolutions by hand    All but the C C   arrays  VB DOM utility functions and XSL-T as OOP language were implemented despite our protests  Of course  over the time  some were discovered  ahem  broken  and abandoned altogether   Of course  the VB King credibility never suffered for that  Among the higher management  he remained a  top gun  technical expert     This produced some amusing side effects  as you can see by following the link  What is the best comment in source code you have ever encountered

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The one that got me was similar to the other poster s  tbl  prefix for SQL table names   In this case  the prefix for all stored procedures was to be  sp   despite the fact that  sp   is a prefix used by Microsoft for system-level stored procedures in SQL Server   Well  they had their standards from an old  non-MS database and weren t about to change just because their standard might cause a stored procedure to collide with a system stored procedure and produce unpredictable results   No  that just wouldn t be proper

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Totally useless database naming conventions  Every table name has to start with a number  The numbers show which kind of data is in the table    0  data that is used everywhere 1  data that is used by a certain module only 2  lookup table 3  calendar  chat and mail 4  logging   This makes it hard to find a table if you only know the first letter of its name  Also - as this is a mssql database - we have to surround tablenames with square brackets everywhere   -- doesn t work select   from 0examples   -- does work select   from  0examples

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At a former job     Normal  tables begin with T   System  tables  usually lookups  begin with TS   except when they don t because somebody didn t feel like it that day  Cross-reference tables begin with TSX  All field names begin with F    Yes  that s right  All of the fields  in every single table  So that we can tell it s a field

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In a large group at my company  we use C   almost exclusively  Passing by non-const reference is forbidden   If you want to modify a parameter to a function  you must pass it by pointer   We have an internal flame war over the pros  easier to identify function calls that can modify variables  and cons  ridiculousness  having to deal with possible NULL pointers when you want a parameter to be required  about once a year

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We have a no code past the 80th character column that is controversial in our C   development team  Liked and code review enforced by some  Despised by others   Also  we have a very controversial C   throw    throw      specification standard  Religiously used by some and demonized by others  Both camps cite discussions and experts to enforce their respective positions

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inserting line breaks     --------------------------------------------------------------------------------  between methods in a c  project

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All documents in my company are version-controlled. So far, so good.

But for EVERY single file, upon first committing to CVS, you must immediately add two tags to it: CRE (for CREation) and DEV001 (for 1st DEVelopment cycle). As if it being the first version of the file itself wasn't enough.

After that, the process gets a bit more reasonable, fortunately.

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Marking private variables with an   just to make sure that we know we are dealing with private variables within the class  Then using php s magic methods   get and   set to provide access to each of the variables as if they were public anyway

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I am not allowed to use this- gt  to reference local variables in our c   code

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Once worked on a project where underscores were banned   And I mean totally banned   So in a c  winforms app  whenever we added a new event handler  e g  for a button  we d have to  rename the default method name from buttonName Click   to something else  just to satisfy the ego of the guy that wrote the coding standards   To this day I don t know what he had against the humble underscore

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Almost any kind of hungarian notation   The problem with hungarian notation is that it is very often misunderstood  The original idea was to prefix the variable so that the meaning was clear  For example   int appCount   0     Number of apples  int pearCount   0     Number of pears    But most people use it to determine the type   int iAppleCount   0     Number of apples  int iPearCount   0      Number of pears    This is confusing  because although both numbers are integers  everybody knows  you can t compare apples with pears

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Not being able to use Reflection as the manager claimed it involved too much  magic

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You must use only five letter table names and the last two character is reserved for IO

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At my first job  all C programs  no matter how simple or complex  had only four functions  You had the main  which called the other three functions in turn  I can t remember their names  but they were something along the lines of  begin    middle    and end    begin   opened files and database connections  end   closed them  and middle   did everything else  Needless to say  middle   was a very long function    And just to make things even better  all variables had to be global   One of my proudest memories of that job is having been part of the general revolt that led to the destruction of those standards

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It was a coding standard I did not follow myself   got in trouble for other things  but never that    We had three 19  monitors  so we could have two editors open to full screen and still have access to the desktop  Everyone else did not use comments  but used meaningful names  Extremely long meaningful names  The longest I remember was in the 80 character range  The average was around 40 50   Guess what  they didn t accurately describe the whole thing

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The strangest was that type qualified variable naming must be used in Java  and the types where those of the columns from the database   So a java sql ResultSet had to be called tblClient etc

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You must use only five letter table names and the last two character is reserved for IO

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no single character variable names - even for a simple iterator like i    Had to use ii or something   I thought this was stupid   Another one - perhaps the craziest of all  but maybe not a coding standard     no STL allowed   and this was in 2007 2008   I left there soon after I found out about that nonsense   Apparently some idiots thought that there was no  standard   As in 15 years ago      I guess they missed the memo about stl being in the C   standard     Use of the stupid COM HRESULTs as return types for just about ALL methods - even if they are not COM   It was ludicrous   So now instead of returning some enumerated type or a useful value that indicates a result  etc  we had to look up what S OK or E FAIL or whatever meant in the context of each of the methods   Again  I left there shortly after that

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All documents in my company are version-controlled. So far, so good.

But for EVERY single file, upon first committing to CVS, you must immediately add two tags to it: CRE (for CREation) and DEV001 (for 1st DEVelopment cycle). As if it being the first version of the file itself wasn't enough.

After that, the process gets a bit more reasonable, fortunately.

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Back in my C   days we were not allowed to use         lt    amp  amp   etc  there were macros for this      if  bob EQ 7 AND alice LEQ 10          blah     this was obviously to deal with the  old accidental assignment in conditional bug   however we also had the rule  put constants before variables   so  if  NULL EQ ptr     ok if  ptr EQ NULL     not ok   Just remembered  the simplest coding standard I ever heard was  Write code as if the next maintainer is a vicious psychopath who knows where you live

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Every beginning and ending brace was required to have a comment    public void HelloWorld string name       if name     Joe           Console WriteLine  Hey  Joe           if name     Joe     else         Console WriteLine  Hello      name         if name     Joe       public void HelloWorld string name    That s what led me to write my first Visual Studio plugin to automate that

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The strangest was that type qualified variable naming must be used in Java  and the types where those of the columns from the database   So a java sql ResultSet had to be called tblClient etc

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Perhaps one of the more frustrating situations I ve encountered was where people insisted on prefixing Stored Procedures with the prefix  sp       If you don t know why this is a bad thing to do  check out this blog entry here   In a nutshell  if SQL Server is looking for a Stored Procedure with an sp  prefix  it will check the master database first  which it won t find unless the SP is actually in the master database    Assuming it isn t in the master DB  SQL Server assumes the SP isn t in the cache and therefore recompiles it     It may sound like a small thing  but it adds up in high volume or busy database server environments

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All file names must be in lower case

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The guys who wrote the compiler are probably a lot smarter than you so don t try something clever  is what one guide line document said  not quite literally

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Back in my C   days we were not allowed to use         lt    amp  amp   etc  there were macros for this      if  bob EQ 7 AND alice LEQ 10          blah     this was obviously to deal with the  old accidental assignment in conditional bug   however we also had the rule  put constants before variables   so  if  NULL EQ ptr     ok if  ptr EQ NULL     not ok   Just remembered  the simplest coding standard I ever heard was  Write code as if the next maintainer is a vicious psychopath who knows where you live

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A buddy of mine encountered this rule while working at a government job   The use of     pre or post  was completely banned   The reason  Different compilers might interpret it differently

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Applying s  to variables and methods which were deemed  safety critical  for software that was part of a control system   Couple this with the other rule about putting m  on the front of member variables and you d get something ridiculous like  s m blah     which is darn annoying to write and not very readable in my opinion   In the end some  safety expert  was supposed to gain insight by looking at the code and determining something from it by using those  s   - in practice  they didn t know c   too well so they couldn t do much other than make reports on the number of identifiers that we d marked as  safety critical    Utter nonsense

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I once worked under the tyranny of the Mighty VB King   The VB King was the pure master of MS Excel and VBA  as well as databases  Hence his surname   He played with Excel while the developers worked with compilers  and challenging him on databases could have detrimental effects on your career       Of course  his immense skills gave him an unique vision of development problems and project management solutions  While not exactly coding standards in the strictest sense  the VB King regularly had new ideas about  coding standards  and  best practices  he tried  and oftentimes succeeded  to impose on us  For example    All C C   arrays shall start at index 1  instead of 0  Indeed  the use of 0 as first index of an array is obsolete  and has been superseded by Visual Basic 6 s insightful array index management  All functions shall return an error code  There are no exceptions in VB6  so why would we need them at all   i e  in C    Since  All functions shall return an error code  is not practical for functions returning meaningful types  all functions shall have an error code as first  in out  parameter  All our code will check the error codes  this led to the worst case of VBScript if-indentation I ever saw in my career    Of course  as the  else  clauses were never handled  no error was actually found until too late   Since we re working with C   COM  starting this very day  we will code all our DOM utility functions in Visual Basic  ASP 115 errors are evil  For this reason  we will use On Error Resume Next in our VBScript ASP code to avoid them  XSL-T is an object oriented language  Use inheritance to resolve your problems  dumb surprise almost broke my jaw open this one day   Exceptions are not used  and thus should be removed  For this reason  we will uncheck the checkbox asking for destructor call in case of exception unwinding  it took days for an expert to find the cause of all those memory leaks  and he almost went berserk when he found out they had willingly ignored  and hidden  his technical note about checking the option again  sent handfuls of weeks before   catch all exceptions in the COM interface of our COM modules  and dispose them silently  this way  instead of crashing  a module would only appear to be faster    Shiny     As we used the   ber error handling described above  it even took us some time to understand what was really happening    You can t have both speed and correct results  can you    Starting today  our code base will split into four branches  We will manage their synchronization and integrate all bug corrections evolutions by hand    All but the C C   arrays  VB DOM utility functions and XSL-T as OOP language were implemented despite our protests  Of course  over the time  some were discovered  ahem  broken  and abandoned altogether   Of course  the VB King credibility never suffered for that  Among the higher management  he remained a  top gun  technical expert     This produced some amusing side effects  as you can see by following the link  What is the best comment in source code you have ever encountered

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Using generic numbered identifier names At my current work we have two rules which are really mean  Rule 1  Every time we create a new field in a database table we have to add additional reserve fields for future use  These reserve fields are numbered  because no one knows which data they will hold some day  The next time we need a new field we first look for an unused reserve field  So we end up with with customer reserve field 14 containing the e-mail address of the customer  At one day our boss thought about introducing reserve tables  but fortunatly we could convince him not to do it  Rule 2  One of our products is written in VB6 and VB6 has a limit of the total count of different identifier names and since the code is very large  we constantly run into this limit  As a  quot solution quot  all local variable names are numbered   Lvarlong1 Lvarlong2 Lvarstr1      Although that effectively circumvents the identifier limit  these two rules combined lead to beautiful code like this        If Lvarbool1 Then   Lvarbool2   True End If  If Lvarbool2 Or Lvarstr1  lt  gt  Lvarstr5 Then   db Execute  quot DELETE FROM customer WHERE  quot            amp   quot reserve field 12     quot   amp  Lvarstr1  amp   quot   quot   End If        You can imagine how hard it is to fix old or someone else s code    Latest update  Now we are also using  quot reserve procedures quot  for private members  Private Sub LSub1 Lvarlong1 As Long  Lvarstr1 As String    If Lvarlong1  gt   0 Then      Lvarbool1   LFunc1 Lvarstr1    Else     Lvarbool1   LFunc6     End If   If Lvarbool1 Then     LSub4 Lvarstr1   End If End Sub  EDIT  It seems that this code pattern is becoming more and more popular  See this The Daily WTF post to learn more  Astigmatism

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The team size was about a dozen   For C  methods we had to put a huge XML formatted function before every function   I don t remember the format exactly but it involved XML tags nested about three to five levels deep   Here s a sketch from memory of the comment        lt comment gt       lt  comment gt       lt table gt          lt thead gt             lt tcolumns gt                lt column gt Date lt  column gt                lt column gt Modified By lt  column gt                lt column gt Comment lt  column gt             lt  tcolumns gt          lt  thead gt          lt rows gt             lt row gt                lt column gt 10 10 2006 lt  column gt                lt column gt Fred lt  column gt                lt column gt Created function lt  column gt             lt  row gt          lt  rows gt       lt parameters gt    I ve got to stop there      The downsides were many    Files were made up mostly of comments    We were not using our version control system for tracking changes to files  Writing many small functions hurt readability  Lots of scrolling  Some people did not update the comments      I used a code snippet  Emacs YAS  to add this code to my methods

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No ternary operator allowed where I currently work   int value    a  lt  b    a   b        because not everyone  gets it   If you told me   Don t use it because we ve had to rewrite them when the structures get too complicated   nested ternary operators  anyone    then I d understand  But when you tell me that some developers don t understand them    um    Sure

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reverse indentation   For example       for int i   0  i  lt  10  i              myFunc                and       if something               do A               else              do B

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Being forced to have only 1 return statement at the end of a method and making the code fall down to that   Also not being able to re-use case statements in a switch and let it drop through  I had to write a convoluted script that did a sort of loop of the switch to handle both cases in the right order   Lastly  when I started using C  I found it very odd to declare my variables at the top of a method and absolutely hated it  I d spent a good couple of years in C   and just declared them wherever I wanted  Unless for optimisation reasons I now declare all method variables at the top of a method with details of what they all do - makes maintenance A LOT easier

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Forbidden   while  true      Allowed   for

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I once worked on a VB NET project where every method body was wrapped in the following Try   Catch block   Public Sub MyMethod       Try           Whatever     Catch Ex As Exception         Throw New Exception  MyClass  MyMethod      Ex ToString        End Try End Sub   Those who do not understand Exception StackTrace are doomed to reinvent it  badly

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The first language I used professionally was 4D  It supported interprocess variables prefixed by a  lt    process variables with no prefixes and local variables which started with a    All those prefixes  or lack thereof  are used by the compiler interpreter to determine the variable s scope    The actual strange coding standard was some sort of hungarian notation  The catch was that instead of naming variables based on their types  they had to be prefixed according to their scope    Variables  whose scope were determined by their prefix  had to be prefixed with redundant information   I don t dare ask the guy responsible for the standards why it had to be this way

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As I always worked self-employed freelancer project leader  I never got into someone s standards  all standards are my decisions  But  I recently found a fun piece of  coding standards document  back when I was 15   All functions must be named  ProjectName FunctionName    Well  procedural PHP  anyone  Those weren t times of hard PHP OOP yet  but still  If I wanted to use code from one project to another  I would have to rewrite all references  etc   I could have used something like  package FunctionName

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My weirdest one was at a contract a couple years ago   ZombieSheep s weird one was part of it  but not the weirdest one in that company   No  the weirdest one in that company was the database naming scheme  Every table was named in all caps  with underscores between the words  Every table had a prefix  generally 1 - 6 characters  which was usually an acronym or an abbreviation of the main table name  Every field of the table was prefixed with the same prefix as well  So  let s say you have a simple schema where people can own cats or dogs  It d look like this   PER PERSON     PER ID     PER NameFirst     PER NameLast         CAT CAT     CAT ID     CAT Name     CAT Breed         DOG DOG     DOG ID     DOG Name     DOG Breed         PERCD PERSON CAT DOG  for the join data      PERCD ID     PERCD PER ID     PERCD CAT ID     PERCD DOG ID   That said  as weird as this felt initially     It grew on me  The reasons behind it made sense  after you wrapped your brain around it   as the prefixes were there to be reminders of  recommended   and enforced   table aliases when building joins  The prefixing made the majority of join queries easier to write  as it was very rare that you d have to explicitly reference a table before the field    Heck  after a while  all of us on the team  6 people on our project  were able to begin referring to tables in conversation by nothing more than the prefix  An acquired taste  to be sure     But one that grew on me  So much so that I still use it  when I have that freedom

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a friend of mine - we ll call him CodeMonkey - got his first job out of college  many years ago  doing in-house development in COBOL  His first program was rejected as  not complying with our standards  because it used     shudder   nested IF statements  the coding standards banned the use of nested IF statements  now  CodeMonkey was not shy and was certain of his abilities  so he persisted in asking everyone up the chain and down the aisle why this rule existed  Most claimed they did not know  some made up stuff about  readability   and finally one person remembered the original reason  the first version of the COBOL compiler they used had a bug and didn t handle nested IF statements correctly   This compiler bug  of course  had been fixed for at least a decade  but no one had challenged the standards   baaa    CodeMonkey was successful in getting the standards changed - eventually

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Half of the team favored four-space indentation  the other half favored two-space indentation   As you can guess  the coding standard mandated three  so as to  offend all equally   a direct quote

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The very strangest one I had  and one which took me quite some time to overthrow  was when the owner of our company demanded that our new product be IE only   If it could work on FireFox  that was OK  but it had to be IE only   This might not sound too strange  except for one little flaw   All of the software was for a bespoke server software package  running on Linux  and all client boxes that our customer was buying were Linux   Short of trying to figure out how to get Wine  in those days  very unreliable  up and running on all of these boxes and seeing if we could get IE running and training their admins how to debug Wine problems  it simply wasn t possible to meet the owner s request   The problem was that he was doing the Web design and simply didn t know how to make Web sites compliant with FireFox   It probably won t shock you to know that that our company went bankrupt

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I once worked under the tyranny of the Mighty VB King   The VB King was the pure master of MS Excel and VBA  as well as databases  Hence his surname   He played with Excel while the developers worked with compilers  and challenging him on databases could have detrimental effects on your career       Of course  his immense skills gave him an unique vision of development problems and project management solutions  While not exactly coding standards in the strictest sense  the VB King regularly had new ideas about  coding standards  and  best practices  he tried  and oftentimes succeeded  to impose on us  For example    All C C   arrays shall start at index 1  instead of 0  Indeed  the use of 0 as first index of an array is obsolete  and has been superseded by Visual Basic 6 s insightful array index management  All functions shall return an error code  There are no exceptions in VB6  so why would we need them at all   i e  in C    Since  All functions shall return an error code  is not practical for functions returning meaningful types  all functions shall have an error code as first  in out  parameter  All our code will check the error codes  this led to the worst case of VBScript if-indentation I ever saw in my career    Of course  as the  else  clauses were never handled  no error was actually found until too late   Since we re working with C   COM  starting this very day  we will code all our DOM utility functions in Visual Basic  ASP 115 errors are evil  For this reason  we will use On Error Resume Next in our VBScript ASP code to avoid them  XSL-T is an object oriented language  Use inheritance to resolve your problems  dumb surprise almost broke my jaw open this one day   Exceptions are not used  and thus should be removed  For this reason  we will uncheck the checkbox asking for destructor call in case of exception unwinding  it took days for an expert to find the cause of all those memory leaks  and he almost went berserk when he found out they had willingly ignored  and hidden  his technical note about checking the option again  sent handfuls of weeks before   catch all exceptions in the COM interface of our COM modules  and dispose them silently  this way  instead of crashing  a module would only appear to be faster    Shiny     As we used the   ber error handling described above  it even took us some time to understand what was really happening    You can t have both speed and correct results  can you    Starting today  our code base will split into four branches  We will manage their synchronization and integrate all bug corrections evolutions by hand    All but the C C   arrays  VB DOM utility functions and XSL-T as OOP language were implemented despite our protests  Of course  over the time  some were discovered  ahem  broken  and abandoned altogether   Of course  the VB King credibility never suffered for that  Among the higher management  he remained a  top gun  technical expert     This produced some amusing side effects  as you can see by following the link  What is the best comment in source code you have ever encountered

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My coding standards gripes are pretty tame compared to some of the heinous stuff I ve seen here  but here goes   I was on a project where some of the developers insisted on the most peculiar form of indenting I ve ever seen    if  condition             x          printf  Hello condition  n         else            y           We were developing for an embedded environment with a really rotten debugger   In fact  printf    hexdump   and the mapfile were the preferred method of debugging   This of course meant using static was forbidden and all global variables and functions had to be of the form modulename variablename   Checking in code with warnings was forbidden  not such a bad thing   but the compiler would warn about any conditional that was constant   Therefore  the old macro statement trick of do   something      while 0  was forbidden   Lastly  leaving a trailing comma on a enumerator list or initializer was considered lazy  and thus forbidden    enum debuglevel            NONE        FATAL        WARNING        VERBOSE       Naughty  naughty          As I ve said  rather tame   But as a follower of  The Ten Commandments for C Programmers   I found the unconventional bracing style absolutely maddening

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The worst I ve experienced was to do with code inspections   For some reason even though we had and used the diff tool of our vcs to see what had changed  when you wanted your code inspected you had to surround your changes in a file function with some comment blocks like so                80charswide          START INSPECT       some changed code             END INSPECT               80charswide           After the inspection you d have to go back and remove all those comment blocks before committing   ugh

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I implemented and modified an open-source asp classic shopping cart  that is mostly a long string of dailyWTF candidates   that started every variable with a lower case p   As in  pTax Amount or pFirst Name   There was no explanation for this  tho I read somewhere on one of their forums it was to avoid using reserved words like State - you d have pState instead   They also append temp to things kinda randomly  like rsTemp  and connTemp  As opposed to the permanent record sets and database connections  I guess

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I implemented and modified an open-source asp classic shopping cart  that is mostly a long string of dailyWTF candidates   that started every variable with a lower case p   As in  pTax Amount or pFirst Name   There was no explanation for this  tho I read somewhere on one of their forums it was to avoid using reserved words like State - you d have pState instead   They also append temp to things kinda randomly  like rsTemp  and connTemp  As opposed to the permanent record sets and database connections  I guess

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I implemented and modified an open-source asp classic shopping cart  that is mostly a long string of dailyWTF candidates   that started every variable with a lower case p   As in  pTax Amount or pFirst Name   There was no explanation for this  tho I read somewhere on one of their forums it was to avoid using reserved words like State - you d have pState instead   They also append temp to things kinda randomly  like rsTemp  and connTemp  As opposed to the permanent record sets and database connections  I guess

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Several WTF s in one VB6 shop  I m not proud  I was hungry and needed to eat  back in 2002 - 2004   The most annoying IMHO  was setting all object references to nothing at the end of the sub function  This was to  help  the compiler reference count  It didn t matter how many tests I performed for the TA to prove it wasn t necessary  Oh no  it still had to be done  even though he had absoutely no evidence to back him up what so ever  Eventually I gave up and about a year later found an article explaining why it was pants  I bring this to the TA thinking  Got the fecker    He goes  Yeah  I ve known about that for years  but if you start changing the standard the sheep   meaning other developers  the people he worked with everyday  will screw it up   Gob sh1te   Others in the same shop    Never delete code  always comment it out  even though we were using source control   Prefixes on table names that were meaningless when I got there  but had to be enforced on new tables  Prefixing all objects with o   lo  for procedure level references  mo  for module  go  for global   Absoutely pointless in a project where every other variable was an object reference    Mostly I was writing c   there  only c   developer  so made own standards  and enforced with rigor   with occasional vb  otherwise I wouldn t have lasted

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My old boss insisted that we use constants instead of enums but never gave a reason and in all the scenarios these were used an enum made more sense   The better one though was insisting that all table names be singular and then making the classes in code singular as well  But not only did they represent the object  such as a user or group  they also represented the table and contained all of the CRUD for that table and numerous other actions  But wait  there   s more  They also had to contain a publicly visible name value collection so that way you could get the properties with an indexer  by column name  just in case you added a new column but didn t want to add in a new property  There were a bunch of other  must do s  that not only didn t make sense  but put a big performance hit on the code as well  I could try to point them all out but the code speaks for itself and sadly this is almost an exact copy of the User class I just pulled out of an old archive folder   public class Record       private string tablename      private Database database       public NameValueCollection Fields       public Record string TableName    this TableName  null          public Record string TableName  Database db                tablename   TableName          database   db             public string TableName               get   return tablename               public ulong ID               get   return GetULong  ID              set   Fields  ID     value ToString                  public virtual ulong GetULong string field                try   return ulong Parse this field              catch Exception    return 0               public virtual bool Change                 InitializeDB       opens the connection            loop over the Fields object and build an update query         DisposeDB       closes the connection            return the status            public virtual bool Create                    works almost just like the Change method            public virtual bool Read                 InitializeDB       opens the connection            use the value of the ID property to build a select query            populate the Fields collection with the columns values if the read was successful         DisposeDB       closes the connection            return the status              public class User       public User     base  User           public User Database db    base  User   db           public string Username               get   return Fields  Username              set                       Fields  Username     value ToString       yes  there really is a redundant ToString call                     sorry if this double posts  first time around I might not of been human or maybe the site just has a limit to how bad code can be to be posted

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We had to sort all the functions in classes alphabetically  to make them  easier to find   Never mind the ide had a drop down  That was too many clicks    same tech lead wrote an app to remove all comments from our source code

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We had to sort all the functions in classes alphabetically  to make them  easier to find   Never mind the ide had a drop down  That was too many clicks    same tech lead wrote an app to remove all comments from our source code

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Perhaps one of the more frustrating situations I ve encountered was where people insisted on prefixing Stored Procedures with the prefix  sp       If you don t know why this is a bad thing to do  check out this blog entry here   In a nutshell  if SQL Server is looking for a Stored Procedure with an sp  prefix  it will check the master database first  which it won t find unless the SP is actually in the master database    Assuming it isn t in the master DB  SQL Server assumes the SP isn t in the cache and therefore recompiles it     It may sound like a small thing  but it adds up in high volume or busy database server environments

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I worked in a VB  NET shop three years ago  where the  technical lead  decreed that all methods accepting a reference type parameter  i e   an object  must use ByRef instead of ByVal   I found this especially odd because they d asked me the ByVal ByRef-what s-the-difference question in my interview  and I explained how it worked for value types and for reference types   His explanation for the practice   Some of the newer  less-experienced devs will get confused otherwise    At the time  I was the most recently hired  and it was my first permanent  NET job   And I wasn t confused by it

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Writing methods comments with pointless information for almost all methods   Not allowing multiple exit points from a method   Hungarian notation for all variables  enums  structures and even classes  e g  iMyInt  tagMySturcture  eMyEnum and CMyClass

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I am not allowed to use this- gt  to reference local variables in our c   code

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I ve had a lot of stupid rules  but not a lot that I considered downright strange   The sillyiest was on a NASA job I worked back in the early 90 s  This was a huge job  with well over 100 developers on it  The experienced developers who wrote the coding standards decided that every source file should begin with a four letter acronym  and the first letter had to stand for the group that was responsible for the file  This was probably a great idea for the old FORTRAN 77 projects they were used to    However  this was an Ada project  with a nice hierarchal library structure  so it made no sense at all  Every directory was full of files starting with the same letter  followed by 3 more nonsense leters  an underscore  and then part of the file name that mattered  All the Ada packages had to start with this same five-character wart  Ada  use  clauses were not allowed either  arguably a good thing under normal circumstances   so that meant any reference to any identifier that wasn t local to that source file also had to include this useless wart  There probably should have been an insurrection over this  but the entire project was staffed by junior programmers and fresh from college new hires  myself being the latter    A typical assignment statement  already verbose in Ada  would end up looking something like this   NABC The Package Name X    NABC The Package Name X      CXYZ Some Other Package Name Delta X    Fortunately they were at least enlightened enough to allow us more than 80 columns  Still  the facility wart was hated enough that it became boilerplate code at the top of everyone s source files to use Ada  renames  to get rid of the wart  There d be one rename for each imported   withed   package  Like this   package Package Name renames NABC Package Name  package Some Other Package Name renames CXYZ Some Other Package Name  --   Repeated in this vein for an average of 10 lines or so   What the more creative among us took to doing was trying to use the wart to make an acutally sensible  or silly  package name   I know what you are thinking  but explitives were not allowed and shame on you  That s disgusting   For example  I was in the Common code group  and I needed to make a package to interface with the Workstation group  After a brainstorming session with the Workstation guy  we decided to name our packages so that someone needing both would have to write   with CANT Interface Package  with WONT Interface Package

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a friend of mine - we ll call him CodeMonkey - got his first job out of college  many years ago  doing in-house development in COBOL  His first program was rejected as  not complying with our standards  because it used     shudder   nested IF statements  the coding standards banned the use of nested IF statements  now  CodeMonkey was not shy and was certain of his abilities  so he persisted in asking everyone up the chain and down the aisle why this rule existed  Most claimed they did not know  some made up stuff about  readability   and finally one person remembered the original reason  the first version of the COBOL compiler they used had a bug and didn t handle nested IF statements correctly   This compiler bug  of course  had been fixed for at least a decade  but no one had challenged the standards   baaa    CodeMonkey was successful in getting the standards changed - eventually

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Several WTF s in one VB6 shop  I m not proud  I was hungry and needed to eat  back in 2002 - 2004   The most annoying IMHO  was setting all object references to nothing at the end of the sub function  This was to  help  the compiler reference count  It didn t matter how many tests I performed for the TA to prove it wasn t necessary  Oh no  it still had to be done  even though he had absoutely no evidence to back him up what so ever  Eventually I gave up and about a year later found an article explaining why it was pants  I bring this to the TA thinking  Got the fecker    He goes  Yeah  I ve known about that for years  but if you start changing the standard the sheep   meaning other developers  the people he worked with everyday  will screw it up   Gob sh1te   Others in the same shop    Never delete code  always comment it out  even though we were using source control   Prefixes on table names that were meaningless when I got there  but had to be enforced on new tables  Prefixing all objects with o   lo  for procedure level references  mo  for module  go  for global   Absoutely pointless in a project where every other variable was an object reference    Mostly I was writing c   there  only c   developer  so made own standards  and enforced with rigor   with occasional vb  otherwise I wouldn t have lasted

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Only one variable can be declared per logical line    Rationale  Multiple declarations per line results in an inaccurate line-of-code count

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This isn t a coding standard issue  but is surely a tale of restrictive thinking   We had completed a short 4 week project in no less than 7 weeks   The schedule was loosely based on guestimating a feature list   The development process consisted of coding furiously   During the postmortem I suggested using milestones and breaking feature requests into tasks   Incredibly  my director dismissed my ideas  saying that because it was such a short project  we didn t need to use milestones or tasks  and asked for other suggestions   The room fell silent   Language   Java  C    HTML Team size   Two teams  totaling 10 engineers Which ill effects it caused you and your team  I felt like I was caught in a Dilbert cartoon

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Every beginning and ending brace was required to have a comment    public void HelloWorld string name       if name     Joe           Console WriteLine  Hey  Joe           if name     Joe     else         Console WriteLine  Hello      name         if name     Joe       public void HelloWorld string name    That s what led me to write my first Visual Studio plugin to automate that

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The guys who wrote the compiler are probably a lot smarter than you so don t try something clever  is what one guide line document said  not quite literally

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Not quite a coding standard  but in 1998 I worked for a company where C   was banned  in favour of C  This was because OO was considered too complex for the software engineers to grasp   In our C code we were required to prefix all semi-colons with a space  int someInt   5     I could never find out a reason for this  but after a while it did grow on me

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Back in the 80 s 90 s  I worked for an aircraft simulator company that used FORTRAN  Our FORTRAN compiler had a limit of 8 characters for variable names  The company s coding standards reserved the first three of them for Hungarian-notation style info  So we had to try and create meaningful variable names with just 5 characters

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I worked at a place that had a merger between 2 companies   The  dominant  one had a major server written in K amp R C  i e  pre-ANSI    They forced the Java teams  from both offices -- probably 20 devs total  to use this format  which gleefully ignored the 2 pillars of the  brace debate  and goes straight to crazy   if   x    y              System out println  this is painful        x   0      y

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Several WTF s in one VB6 shop  I m not proud  I was hungry and needed to eat  back in 2002 - 2004   The most annoying IMHO  was setting all object references to nothing at the end of the sub function  This was to  help  the compiler reference count  It didn t matter how many tests I performed for the TA to prove it wasn t necessary  Oh no  it still had to be done  even though he had absoutely no evidence to back him up what so ever  Eventually I gave up and about a year later found an article explaining why it was pants  I bring this to the TA thinking  Got the fecker    He goes  Yeah  I ve known about that for years  but if you start changing the standard the sheep   meaning other developers  the people he worked with everyday  will screw it up   Gob sh1te   Others in the same shop    Never delete code  always comment it out  even though we were using source control   Prefixes on table names that were meaningless when I got there  but had to be enforced on new tables  Prefixing all objects with o   lo  for procedure level references  mo  for module  go  for global   Absoutely pointless in a project where every other variable was an object reference    Mostly I was writing c   there  only c   developer  so made own standards  and enforced with rigor   with occasional vb  otherwise I wouldn t have lasted

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The last place I worked was primarily a C   shop  and before I was hired my boss  who was the director of research and development  had issued a decree that  dynamic memory allocation is not allowed   No  new   not even a  malloc  -- because  those can lead to memory leaks if a developer forgets the corresponding delete free operation   As a corollary to this particular rule   pointers are also not allowed   although references were totally acceptable  being both awesome and safe    I repealed those rules  as opposed to  say  rewriting all our software in other languages  but I did have to add a few awesome rules of my own  like  you may not launch a new thread without written approval from someone qualified to do that sort of thing  based on an unfortunate series of code reviews  sigh

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no single character variable names - even for a simple iterator like i    Had to use ii or something   I thought this was stupid   Another one - perhaps the craziest of all  but maybe not a coding standard     no STL allowed   and this was in 2007 2008   I left there soon after I found out about that nonsense   Apparently some idiots thought that there was no  standard   As in 15 years ago      I guess they missed the memo about stl being in the C   standard     Use of the stupid COM HRESULTs as return types for just about ALL methods - even if they are not COM   It was ludicrous   So now instead of returning some enumerated type or a useful value that indicates a result  etc  we had to look up what S OK or E FAIL or whatever meant in the context of each of the methods   Again  I left there shortly after that

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I ran into two rules that I really hated on a C job a few years ago     One module per file   where  module  was defined as a C function  Function-local variables allowed only at the top of the function  so this sort of thing was illegal     if  test       int i

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If I remember correctly the delphi IDE did a default indent of two spaces   Most of the legacy code for the company had three spaces and was written by the VP IT and the CEO   One day  all the programmers were talking about what we should do to make our lives easier and a contractor who knew Delphi pretty well said   Hey the ide defaults to two spaces does anyone have a problem with us doing this going forward for new code    All of us looked at each other  and pretty much thought it was a no brainer and said that we agreed     Two days later the VP and CEO found out we were going to make such a dangerous change that could  cause problems  and instructed us that we would be using three indents for everything until the two of them could accurately evaluate the impact of such a change   Now I am all for following standards  but these are the same people who thought oo programming was creating an object with one function that had all of the logic necessary to perform an action  and that source control was moving the code files to a different directory

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We have a no code past the 80th character column that is controversial in our C   development team  Liked and code review enforced by some  Despised by others   Also  we have a very controversial C   throw    throw      specification standard  Religiously used by some and demonized by others  Both camps cite discussions and experts to enforce their respective positions

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Back in the 80 s 90 s  I worked for an aircraft simulator company that used FORTRAN  Our FORTRAN compiler had a limit of 8 characters for variable names  The company s coding standards reserved the first three of them for Hungarian-notation style info  So we had to try and create meaningful variable names with just 5 characters

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Prefix tables with dbo   Yes  as in dbo dbo tablename

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I am not allowed to use this- gt  to reference local variables in our c   code

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Totally useless database naming conventions  Every table name has to start with a number  The numbers show which kind of data is in the table    0  data that is used everywhere 1  data that is used by a certain module only 2  lookup table 3  calendar  chat and mail 4  logging   This makes it hard to find a table if you only know the first letter of its name  Also - as this is a mssql database - we have to surround tablenames with square brackets everywhere   -- doesn t work select   from 0examples   -- does work select   from  0examples

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I absolutely hate it when someone doesn t use a naming convention  At where I worked  the lead developer  who I replaced  couldn t figure out if he wanted to use camelCase  or way over used underscores  Personally  I hate the underscores and the camel case is easier to read  but it doesn t really matter as long as you keep to one standard   PHP is especially bad at this  take a look at mysql numrows which merges the two without the caps

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Writing methods comments with pointless information for almost all methods   Not allowing multiple exit points from a method   Hungarian notation for all variables  enums  structures and even classes  e g  iMyInt  tagMySturcture  eMyEnum and CMyClass

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Half of the team favored four-space indentation  the other half favored two-space indentation   As you can guess  the coding standard mandated three  so as to  offend all equally   a direct quote

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At a major UK bank I was brought in to act as a design authority on a new  NET system   Their rules state that the database tables had to be a maximum of 8 characters long  with the project code  a 5 digit code  as the prefix   They were enforcing old DB2 rules onto Windows projects sigh

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At the place I m currently working  the official coding standard stipulates a maximum line length of eighty characters  The rational was to enable hard-copies of the code to be formatted  Needless to say  this led to very odd code layout  I ve worked to eliminate this standard  mainly through the argument of  when was the last time you made a hard-copy of code   Readability now versus chance of making a hard-copy on an eighty column DMP   Skizz

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Only one variable can be declared per logical line    Rationale  Multiple declarations per line results in an inaccurate line-of-code count

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The very strangest one I had  and one which took me quite some time to overthrow  was when the owner of our company demanded that our new product be IE only   If it could work on FireFox  that was OK  but it had to be IE only   This might not sound too strange  except for one little flaw   All of the software was for a bespoke server software package  running on Linux  and all client boxes that our customer was buying were Linux   Short of trying to figure out how to get Wine  in those days  very unreliable  up and running on all of these boxes and seeing if we could get IE running and training their admins how to debug Wine problems  it simply wasn t possible to meet the owner s request   The problem was that he was doing the Web design and simply didn t know how to make Web sites compliant with FireFox   It probably won t shock you to know that that our company went bankrupt

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inserting line breaks     --------------------------------------------------------------------------------  between methods in a c  project

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I was told that old code should be commented out rather than being removed  in case we needed to refer to the old code  yes  the code was in source control       This doesn t seem that bad  until major changes are made   Then it becomes a nightmare  with entire sections deleted all over the code

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Not quite a coding standard  but in 1998 I worked for a company where C   was banned  in favour of C  This was because OO was considered too complex for the software engineers to grasp   In our C code we were required to prefix all semi-colons with a space  int someInt   5     I could never find out a reason for this  but after a while it did grow on me

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When using SQL Server  which has such big limits on table name length that I ve never personally bumped into them  we were forced to use the naming convention from the older mainframe system  even though the new system never interacted with the mainframe database   Because of the tiny limit on the table names  the convention was to give all the tables codenames  rather than meaningful descriptions   So  on a system that could quite happily have had the  customer  table called  ThisIsTheCustomerTable   instead it was called  TBRC03AA   And the next table was called  TBRC03AB   and the next one called  TBRC03AC   and so on   That made the SQL really easy to understand  especially a month after you d written it

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Adding an 80 character comment at the end of each method so it is easy to find the end of the method   Like this   void doSomething         ----------------------------------------------------------------------------   The rationale being that    some users don t use IDE s that have code folding  Ok I will give them that   a space between methods is not clear since people may not follow the other coding standards about indenting and brace placement  hence it would be hard to find the end of a function    Not releavent  if you need to add this because people don t follow your coding standard then why should they follow this one

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Totally useless database naming conventions  Every table name has to start with a number  The numbers show which kind of data is in the table    0  data that is used everywhere 1  data that is used by a certain module only 2  lookup table 3  calendar  chat and mail 4  logging   This makes it hard to find a table if you only know the first letter of its name  Also - as this is a mssql database - we have to surround tablenames with square brackets everywhere   -- doesn t work select   from 0examples   -- does work select   from  0examples

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I worked in a place where the coding standard was one giant WTF  strange Hungarian notation  prefixing globals with  g  and members with  m   so there were gems like gsSomeVariable   adding  ref string sError  to every single function  instead of throwing exceptions  which was a BIG nono     The killer  though  was prefixing the function parameters with I  for input parameters  and O  for output parameters   I work now in a much better place

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I worked at a place that had a merger between 2 companies   The  dominant  one had a major server written in K amp R C  i e  pre-ANSI    They forced the Java teams  from both offices -- probably 20 devs total  to use this format  which gleefully ignored the 2 pillars of the  brace debate  and goes straight to crazy   if   x    y              System out println  this is painful        x   0      y

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On one of my first jobs the boss said that we should always use fully qualified type names in C  and forbid usings  since we should always know which type we re using when declaring variable  parameter  etc

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The guys who wrote the compiler are probably a lot smarter than you so don t try something clever  is what one guide line document said  not quite literally

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Probably only funny in the uk   An insurer I worked at wanted a combination  P  or  L  to denote the scope  concatenated with hungarian for the type  on all properties   The plus point was we had a property called pintMaster   Made us all fancy a drink

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I had to spell and grammar check my comments  They had to be complete sentences  properly capitalized and finished with a period

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Postfixing   to member variables  e g   int numberofCycles     This was in C   on an open source project with a couple of developers  The main side effect was not knowing that a variable had class scope until getting to the end of the name  Not something I had thought much about before  but clearly backwards

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My weirdest one was at a contract a couple years ago   ZombieSheep s weird one was part of it  but not the weirdest one in that company   No  the weirdest one in that company was the database naming scheme  Every table was named in all caps  with underscores between the words  Every table had a prefix  generally 1 - 6 characters  which was usually an acronym or an abbreviation of the main table name  Every field of the table was prefixed with the same prefix as well  So  let s say you have a simple schema where people can own cats or dogs  It d look like this   PER PERSON     PER ID     PER NameFirst     PER NameLast         CAT CAT     CAT ID     CAT Name     CAT Breed         DOG DOG     DOG ID     DOG Name     DOG Breed         PERCD PERSON CAT DOG  for the join data      PERCD ID     PERCD PER ID     PERCD CAT ID     PERCD DOG ID   That said  as weird as this felt initially     It grew on me  The reasons behind it made sense  after you wrapped your brain around it   as the prefixes were there to be reminders of  recommended   and enforced   table aliases when building joins  The prefixing made the majority of join queries easier to write  as it was very rare that you d have to explicitly reference a table before the field    Heck  after a while  all of us on the team  6 people on our project  were able to begin referring to tables in conversation by nothing more than the prefix  An acquired taste  to be sure     But one that grew on me  So much so that I still use it  when I have that freedom

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In my last job  my supervisor always enforced Murphy s Law    Anything that can go wrong will go wrong    I guess it was so we didn t slack off doing some quick fixes in the code or something like that  And now I constantly have that phrase in my head

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Anything having to do with formatting  especially place of     and other block character  is always a pain to enforce   Even with an automatic format at each source file checking  you can not be sure every developer will ever always use the same formatter  with the same formatting set of rules     And then you have to merge those files back to trunk  And you commit suicide

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Use   or m  in front of global variable when you can simply use the keyword this  when you need to access global variable

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When I started working at one place  and started entering my code into the source control  my boss suddenly came up to me  and asked me to stop committing so much  He told me it is discouraged to do more than 1 commit per-day for a developer because it litters the source control  I simply gaped at him     Later I understood that the reason he even came up to me about it is because the SVN server would send him  and 10 more high executives  a mail for each commit someone makes  And by littering the source control I guessed he ment his mailbox

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Forbidden   while  true      Allowed   for

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The creator of the file  doesn t have to put any code in  has to put their name in the file  So if you create stubs or placeholders  you  own  them forever   The guy who actually writes the code doesn t add his name  we had source control so that we d know  always who to blame

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The strangest one i saw was database table naming where the tables were prefaced with a TLA for functional area  eg accounting ACC then a 3 digit number to  overide the default sort  and then the table name   Plus this was extended into the column names as well   ACC100 AccountCode  it was a nightmare to read a query  they were so unreadable

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In C    we had to write explicitly everything that the compiler is supposed to write for us  default constructor  destructor  copy constructor  copy assignment operator  for every class   Looks like whoever wrote the standards was not very confident on the language

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We were doing a C   project and the team lead was a Pascal guy   So we had a coding standard include file to redefine all that pesky C and C   syntax    define BEGIN    define END     but wait there s more    define ENDIF    define CASE switch   etc    It s hard to remember after all this time   This took what would have been perfectly readable C   code and made it illegible to anyone except the team lead   We also had to use reverse Hungarian notation  i e   MyClass  class pt     pt   pointer to type  UINT32 maxHops u      u   uint32   although oddly I grew to like this

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The creator of the file  doesn t have to put any code in  has to put their name in the file  So if you create stubs or placeholders  you  own  them forever   The guy who actually writes the code doesn t add his name  we had source control so that we d know  always who to blame

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Use   or m  in front of global variable when you can simply use the keyword this  when you need to access global variable

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The creator of the file  doesn t have to put any code in  has to put their name in the file  So if you create stubs or placeholders  you  own  them forever   The guy who actually writes the code doesn t add his name  we had source control so that we d know  always who to blame

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SCORM for sure   http   en wikipedia org wiki SCORM

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We re coding after MISRA standard  The ruleset has  MUST  and  CAN  parts  and we spent hours of discussing which rules we don t want to apply and why  when someday upper management said  We want to tell our customers we re 100  compliant  Tomorrow  we apply all    Among the rules is one that says  No bit operations on signed data  Trying to find out what the rule is for  the explanation was presented  There is no guarantee about the bit representation of signed data  There is only 2s complement in the world  but the standard makes no guarantee   Anyway  doesn t sound like a big thing - who wants to declare bitcoded variables as signed   However  the holy rules checker interprets  integer promotion  as  promotion to signed  and the C standards guru says it has to be  And every bit operation does integer promotion  So instead of   a  amp     1  lt  lt  i    you have to write   a    unsigned int  a  amp   unsigned int   unsigned int  1  lt  lt  i     which is obviously much more readable and portable and all  Fortunately I found out that a shifted 1u stays unsigned  So you can reduce it to   a    unsigned int  a  amp   unsigned int   1u  lt  lt  i     Funnily  there is a rule that was not activated  Forbid using funny characters like     in  include  The DOS-corrupted folks won t believe that writing  include  bla foo h  does work even with every windows compiler and is much more portable

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Half of the team favored four-space indentation  the other half favored two-space indentation   As you can guess  the coding standard mandated three  so as to  offend all equally   a direct quote

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Adding an 80 character comment at the end of each method so it is easy to find the end of the method   Like this   void doSomething         ----------------------------------------------------------------------------   The rationale being that    some users don t use IDE s that have code folding  Ok I will give them that   a space between methods is not clear since people may not follow the other coding standards about indenting and brace placement  hence it would be hard to find the end of a function    Not releavent  if you need to add this because people don t follow your coding standard then why should they follow this one

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To NEVER remove any code when making changes   We were told to comment all changes   Bear in mind we use source control   This policy didn t last long because developers were in an uproar about it and how it would make the code unreadable

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The Project i work for hard coding is a strict NO  So we were forced to hash define as below   define 1 ONE

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We were doing a C   project and the team lead was a Pascal guy   So we had a coding standard include file to redefine all that pesky C and C   syntax    define BEGIN    define END     but wait there s more    define ENDIF    define CASE switch   etc    It s hard to remember after all this time   This took what would have been perfectly readable C   code and made it illegible to anyone except the team lead   We also had to use reverse Hungarian notation  i e   MyClass  class pt     pt   pointer to type  UINT32 maxHops u      u   uint32   although oddly I grew to like this

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Almost any kind of hungarian notation   The problem with hungarian notation is that it is very often misunderstood  The original idea was to prefix the variable so that the meaning was clear  For example   int appCount   0     Number of apples  int pearCount   0     Number of pears    But most people use it to determine the type   int iAppleCount   0     Number of apples  int iPearCount   0      Number of pears    This is confusing  because although both numbers are integers  everybody knows  you can t compare apples with pears

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We have a no code past the 80th character column that is controversial in our C   development team  Liked and code review enforced by some  Despised by others   Also  we have a very controversial C   throw    throw      specification standard  Religiously used by some and demonized by others  Both camps cite discussions and experts to enforce their respective positions

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In Java  when contracting somewhere that shall remain nameless  Interfaces were banned  The logic  The guy in charge couldn t find implementing classes with Eclipse     Also banned - anonymous inner classes  on the grounds that the guy in charge didn t know what they were  Which made implementing a Swing GUI all kinds of fun

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My old boss insisted that we use constants instead of enums but never gave a reason and in all the scenarios these were used an enum made more sense   The better one though was insisting that all table names be singular and then making the classes in code singular as well  But not only did they represent the object  such as a user or group  they also represented the table and contained all of the CRUD for that table and numerous other actions  But wait  there   s more  They also had to contain a publicly visible name value collection so that way you could get the properties with an indexer  by column name  just in case you added a new column but didn t want to add in a new property  There were a bunch of other  must do s  that not only didn t make sense  but put a big performance hit on the code as well  I could try to point them all out but the code speaks for itself and sadly this is almost an exact copy of the User class I just pulled out of an old archive folder   public class Record       private string tablename      private Database database       public NameValueCollection Fields       public Record string TableName    this TableName  null          public Record string TableName  Database db                tablename   TableName          database   db             public string TableName               get   return tablename               public ulong ID               get   return GetULong  ID              set   Fields  ID     value ToString                  public virtual ulong GetULong string field                try   return ulong Parse this field              catch Exception    return 0               public virtual bool Change                 InitializeDB       opens the connection            loop over the Fields object and build an update query         DisposeDB       closes the connection            return the status            public virtual bool Create                    works almost just like the Change method            public virtual bool Read                 InitializeDB       opens the connection            use the value of the ID property to build a select query            populate the Fields collection with the columns values if the read was successful         DisposeDB       closes the connection            return the status              public class User       public User     base  User           public User Database db    base  User   db           public string Username               get   return Fields  Username              set                       Fields  Username     value ToString       yes  there really is a redundant ToString call                     sorry if this double posts  first time around I might not of been human or maybe the site just has a limit to how bad code can be to be posted

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The first programming job I had was with a Microsoft QuickBASIC 4 5 shop   The lead developer had been working in BASIC just about forever  so most of the advanced     features of QuickBASIC were off-limits because they were new and he didn t understand them   So    No Sub End Sub procedures   Everything was done with GOSUB We were allowed to not number lines that weren t the target of GOTO or GOSUB  But GOTO targets has to be a numeric label  not a name  Targets of GOSUB were allowed to be named  but the name had to prefixed by  S  and a four digit number   All subroutines had to have the four digit number sorted in order in the source file   So a typical routine might be S1135InitializePrinter   You d have to go and find the right routine to get the number  there were enough that you couldn t hope to remember them all  No block IF END IF  All IFs had to have either a single GOTO or GOSUB as the conditional statement    That was a really fun job   No  seriously

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A buddy of mine encountered this rule while working at a government job   The use of     pre or post  was completely banned   The reason  Different compilers might interpret it differently

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The team size was about a dozen   For C  methods we had to put a huge XML formatted function before every function   I don t remember the format exactly but it involved XML tags nested about three to five levels deep   Here s a sketch from memory of the comment        lt comment gt       lt  comment gt       lt table gt          lt thead gt             lt tcolumns gt                lt column gt Date lt  column gt                lt column gt Modified By lt  column gt                lt column gt Comment lt  column gt             lt  tcolumns gt          lt  thead gt          lt rows gt             lt row gt                lt column gt 10 10 2006 lt  column gt                lt column gt Fred lt  column gt                lt column gt Created function lt  column gt             lt  row gt          lt  rows gt       lt parameters gt    I ve got to stop there      The downsides were many    Files were made up mostly of comments    We were not using our version control system for tracking changes to files  Writing many small functions hurt readability  Lots of scrolling  Some people did not update the comments      I used a code snippet  Emacs YAS  to add this code to my methods

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In 1987 or so  I took a job with a company that hired me because I was one of a small handful of people who knew how to use Revelation   Revelation  if you ve never heard of it  was essentially a PC-based implementation of the Pick operating system - which  if you ve never heard of it  got its name from its inventor  the fabulously-named Dick Pick   Much can be said about the Pick OS  most of it good   A number of supermini vendors  Prime and MIPS  at least  used Pick  or their own custom implementations of it   This company was a Prime shop  and for their in-house systems they used Information    No  that was really its name   it was Prime s implementation of Pick    They had a contract with the state to build a PC-based system  and had put about a year into their Revelation project before the guy doing all the work  who was also their MIS director  decided he couldn t do both jobs anymore and hired me   At any rate  he d established a number of coding standards for their Prime-based software  many of which derived from two basic conditions  1  the use of 80-column dumb terminals  and 2  the fact that since Prime didn t have a visual editor  he d written his own   Because of the magic portability of Pick code  he d brought his editor down into Revelation  and had built the entire project on the PC using it   Revelation  of course  being PC-based  had a perfectly good full-screen editor  and didn t object when you went past column 80   However  for the first several months I was there  he insisted that I use his editor and his standards   So  the first standard was that every line of code had to be commented   Every line   No exceptions   His rationale for that was that even if your comment said exactly what you had just written in the code  having to comment it meant you at least thought about the line twice   Also  as he cheerfully pointed out  he d added a command to the editor that formatted each line of code so that you could put an end-of-line comment   Oh  yes   When you commented every line of code  it was with end-of-line comments   In short  the first 64 characters of each line were for code  then there was a semicolon  and then you had 15 characters to describe what your 64 characters did   In short  we were using an assembly language convention to format our Pick Basic code   This led to things that looked like this   EVENT LIST DATE INDEX  -1               ADD THE MOST RECENT EVENT    EVENTS LEN EVENTS                    TO THE END OF EVENT LIST    Actually  after 20 years I have finally forgotten R Basic s line-continuation syntax  so it may have looked different   But you get the idea    Additionally  whenever you had to insert multiline comments  the rule was that you use a flower box                                                                                IN CASE YOU NEVER HEARD OF ONE  OR COULDN T GUESS FROM ITS NAME          THIS IS A FLOWER BOX                                                                                                                            Yes  those closing asterisks on each line were required   After all  if you used his editor  it was just a simple editor command to insert a flower box   Getting him to relent and let me use Revelation s built-in editor was quite a battle   At first he was insistent  simply because those were the rules   When I objected that a  I already knew the Revelation editor b  it was substantially more functional than his editor  c  other Revelation developers would have the same perspective  he retorted that if I didn t train on his editor I wouldn t ever be able to work on the Prime codebase  which  as we both knew  was not going to happen as long as hell remained unfrozen over   Finally he gave in   But the coding standards were the last to go   The flower-box comments in particular were a stupid waste of time  and he fought me tooth and nail on them  saying that if I d just use the right editor maintaining them would be perfectly easy    The whole thing got pretty passive-aggressive    Finally I quietly gave in  and from then on all of the code I brought to code reviews had his precious flower-box comments   One day  several months into the job  when I d pretty much proven myself more than competent  especially in comparison with the remarkable parade of other coders that passed through that office while I worked there   he was looking over my shoulder as I worked  and he noticed I wasn t using flower-box comments   Oh  I said  I wrote a source-code formatter that converts my comments into your style when I print them out   It s easier than maintaining them in the editor   He opened his mouth  thought for a moment  closed it  went away  and we never talked about coding standards again   Both of our jobs got easier after that

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In C    we had to write explicitly everything that the compiler is supposed to write for us  default constructor  destructor  copy constructor  copy assignment operator  for every class   Looks like whoever wrote the standards was not very confident on the language

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The strangest one i saw was database table naming where the tables were prefaced with a TLA for functional area  eg accounting ACC then a 3 digit number to  overide the default sort  and then the table name   Plus this was extended into the column names as well   ACC100 AccountCode  it was a nightmare to read a query  they were so unreadable

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Back in my COBOL days  we had to use three asterisks for comments  COBOL requires only one asterisk in column 7   We even had a pre-compiler that checked for this  and wouldn t compile your program if you used anything but three asterisks

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The first language I used professionally was 4D  It supported interprocess variables prefixed by a  lt    process variables with no prefixes and local variables which started with a    All those prefixes  or lack thereof  are used by the compiler interpreter to determine the variable s scope    The actual strange coding standard was some sort of hungarian notation  The catch was that instead of naming variables based on their types  they had to be prefixed according to their scope    Variables  whose scope were determined by their prefix  had to be prefixed with redundant information   I don t dare ask the guy responsible for the standards why it had to be this way

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In Delphi we had to change from  if something then begin       end else begin      end    to  if something then begin       end else begin      end    in a project with 1 5 million lines of code  Imagine how easy this was on source control  diff  and merge  It also led to forgetting begin and not noticing it right away when the compiler announced a superflous end

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Back in my COBOL days  we had to use three asterisks for comments  COBOL requires only one asterisk in column 7   We even had a pre-compiler that checked for this  and wouldn t compile your program if you used anything but three asterisks

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In a large group at my company  we use C   almost exclusively  Passing by non-const reference is forbidden   If you want to modify a parameter to a function  you must pass it by pointer   We have an internal flame war over the pros  easier to identify function calls that can modify variables  and cons  ridiculousness  having to deal with possible NULL pointers when you want a parameter to be required  about once a year

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having to put m  prefix on java instance variables and g  prefix on java static variables  most un-Java idiot cruft I have ever had to deal with  perpetuated by C and C   developers that didn t know how to use anything other than notepad to develop Java with    except that nobody actually followed this except to put m  on everything even statics even method names

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Anything having to do with formatting  especially place of     and other block character  is always a pain to enforce   Even with an automatic format at each source file checking  you can not be sure every developer will ever always use the same formatter  with the same formatting set of rules     And then you have to merge those files back to trunk  And you commit suicide

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The worst is a nameless place I still earn money from  there are no standards  Every program is new adventure    Fortunately another contractor and I are slowly training the real employees and forcing some structure on the mess

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Strangest was  this must be coded in C      Presumably I m being hired for my expertise   If my expert opinion says another language would do the job better  then that other language should be the one used   Telling me which tool I should use is about the same as telling an automobile mechanic that he s only allowed to use metric wrenches   And only wrenches

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I am not allowed to use this- gt  to reference local variables in our c   code

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I ran into two rules that I really hated on a C job a few years ago     One module per file   where  module  was defined as a C function  Function-local variables allowed only at the top of the function  so this sort of thing was illegal     if  test       int i

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I worked in a VB  NET shop three years ago  where the  technical lead  decreed that all methods accepting a reference type parameter  i e   an object  must use ByRef instead of ByVal   I found this especially odd because they d asked me the ByVal ByRef-what s-the-difference question in my interview  and I explained how it worked for value types and for reference types   His explanation for the practice   Some of the newer  less-experienced devs will get confused otherwise    At the time  I was the most recently hired  and it was my first permanent  NET job   And I wasn t confused by it

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While coding for a VB project I was asked to add the following comment section for each of the methods   Module Name  Module Description  Parameters and description of each parameter  Called by  Calls   While I found the rest quite alright but I was against the last two  the reason I argued was the as the project becomes large it will become difficult to maintain  If we are creating the library function then we can never be able to maintain Called by  We were small team of 6  so the argument made by manager was that since you are going to call the functions this should be maintained  Anyway I had to give up this argument as the manager was adamant  The result was as expected  as the project become larger no one cared to maintain Called by and Calls

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All file names must be in lower case

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One that no one has mentioned is being forced to write unit tests for classes that are brainless getters and setters

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at my previous job  which I gladly quit 3 months ago   database    Table names had to be uppercase  Table names had to be prefixed TBL  Fields had to be prefixed  DS   for varchar  which made no sense  NU  for numbers CD  for   bit fields   DT  for dates database fields had also to be uppercase  CD ENABLED  same with sp names  SP INFINITY USER GROUPS QRY  and database names  INFINITY  did I mention sp names were actually like that  SP  prefix  then database name SP INFINITY  then table name  SP INFINITY USER GROUPS then what the sp was actually expected to do  QRY UPD DEL INS  jesus  don t even get me started on queries that weren t just CRUD queries  all text fields had to be varchar MAX   unequivocally   numbers were either int or double  even when you could have used other type   boolean  fields  bit  were int  no reason  stored procedures had to be prefixed sp productname    asp net   c    javascript   EVERY single function had to be wrapped in try  catch    so the applications wouldn t  explode   at least that was the official reason   even when this produced things not working and not having a clue why  parameters must be prefixed with p  e g pCount  pPage scope variables had to be prefixed with w  as in  working   what the hell does that even mean   statics with g  etc  everything post framework 1 1 was offlimits  like you had any real uses for linq and generics anyways   I made it a point to enforce them to let me use jquery though  I succeded at that  at least

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The first language I used professionally was 4D  It supported interprocess variables prefixed by a  lt    process variables with no prefixes and local variables which started with a    All those prefixes  or lack thereof  are used by the compiler interpreter to determine the variable s scope    The actual strange coding standard was some sort of hungarian notation  The catch was that instead of naming variables based on their types  they had to be prefixed according to their scope    Variables  whose scope were determined by their prefix  had to be prefixed with redundant information   I don t dare ask the guy responsible for the standards why it had to be this way

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I hate it when the use of multiple returns is banned

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One that no one has mentioned is being forced to write unit tests for classes that are brainless getters and setters

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It was a coding standard I did not follow myself   got in trouble for other things  but never that    We had three 19  monitors  so we could have two editors open to full screen and still have access to the desktop  Everyone else did not use comments  but used meaningful names  Extremely long meaningful names  The longest I remember was in the 80 character range  The average was around 40 50   Guess what  they didn t accurately describe the whole thing

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I ve had a lot of stupid rules  but not a lot that I considered downright strange   The sillyiest was on a NASA job I worked back in the early 90 s  This was a huge job  with well over 100 developers on it  The experienced developers who wrote the coding standards decided that every source file should begin with a four letter acronym  and the first letter had to stand for the group that was responsible for the file  This was probably a great idea for the old FORTRAN 77 projects they were used to    However  this was an Ada project  with a nice hierarchal library structure  so it made no sense at all  Every directory was full of files starting with the same letter  followed by 3 more nonsense leters  an underscore  and then part of the file name that mattered  All the Ada packages had to start with this same five-character wart  Ada  use  clauses were not allowed either  arguably a good thing under normal circumstances   so that meant any reference to any identifier that wasn t local to that source file also had to include this useless wart  There probably should have been an insurrection over this  but the entire project was staffed by junior programmers and fresh from college new hires  myself being the latter    A typical assignment statement  already verbose in Ada  would end up looking something like this   NABC The Package Name X    NABC The Package Name X      CXYZ Some Other Package Name Delta X    Fortunately they were at least enlightened enough to allow us more than 80 columns  Still  the facility wart was hated enough that it became boilerplate code at the top of everyone s source files to use Ada  renames  to get rid of the wart  There d be one rename for each imported   withed   package  Like this   package Package Name renames NABC Package Name  package Some Other Package Name renames CXYZ Some Other Package Name  --   Repeated in this vein for an average of 10 lines or so   What the more creative among us took to doing was trying to use the wart to make an acutally sensible  or silly  package name   I know what you are thinking  but explitives were not allowed and shame on you  That s disgusting   For example  I was in the Common code group  and I needed to make a package to interface with the Workstation group  After a brainstorming session with the Workstation guy  we decided to name our packages so that someone needing both would have to write   with CANT Interface Package  with WONT Interface Package

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inserting line breaks     --------------------------------------------------------------------------------  between methods in a c  project

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Although this wasn t at a job  we had a massive project for a class in college   One of the requirements was commenting every line of code in our application -- regardless of what it did    and each line had to be specific e g   int x 0    declare variable x and assign it to 0   We weren t allowed to do this   int x  y  z   0    declare and assign to 0   As it wasn t detailed enough   And that s not even following the naming conventions forced upon us   Needless to say we spent a few hours going back through the code

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reverse indentation   For example       for int i   0  i  lt  10  i              myFunc                and       if something               do A               else              do B

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All file names must be in lower case

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There must be 165 unit tests  not necessarily automated  per 1000 lines of code   That works out at one test for roughly every 8 lines     Needless to say  some of the lines of code are quite long  and functions return this pointers to allow chaining

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I was told that old code should be commented out rather than being removed  in case we needed to refer to the old code  yes  the code was in source control       This doesn t seem that bad  until major changes are made   Then it becomes a nightmare  with entire sections deleted all over the code

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I worked in a VB  NET shop three years ago  where the  technical lead  decreed that all methods accepting a reference type parameter  i e   an object  must use ByRef instead of ByVal   I found this especially odd because they d asked me the ByVal ByRef-what s-the-difference question in my interview  and I explained how it worked for value types and for reference types   His explanation for the practice   Some of the newer  less-experienced devs will get confused otherwise    At the time  I was the most recently hired  and it was my first permanent  NET job   And I wasn t confused by it

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At my first job  all C programs  no matter how simple or complex  had only four functions  You had the main  which called the other three functions in turn  I can t remember their names  but they were something along the lines of  begin    middle    and end    begin   opened files and database connections  end   closed them  and middle   did everything else  Needless to say  middle   was a very long function    And just to make things even better  all variables had to be global   One of my proudest memories of that job is having been part of the general revolt that led to the destruction of those standards

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I worked at a place that had a merger between 2 companies   The  dominant  one had a major server written in K amp R C  i e  pre-ANSI    They forced the Java teams  from both offices -- probably 20 devs total  to use this format  which gleefully ignored the 2 pillars of the  brace debate  and goes straight to crazy   if   x    y              System out println  this is painful        x   0      y

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All documents in my company are version-controlled. So far, so good.

But for EVERY single file, upon first committing to CVS, you must immediately add two tags to it: CRE (for CREation) and DEV001 (for 1st DEVelopment cycle). As if it being the first version of the file itself wasn't enough.

After that, the process gets a bit more reasonable, fortunately.

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The worst coding standard I ve ever had to live with was insane indentation   The code had originally been written on a mainframe using 60x80 character green-screen terminals  this was quite a long time ago   The default tab size on these things was 8 characters  but the programmers at the time decided that was too big - the screen itself only showed 80 characters across  so an 8-character tab wasted a lot of space   So they decided to set the intent size for their code to 4 characters   All fair enough  you say  Except that they didn t do it by changing the tab size  They did it by making the first indentation to be 4 spaces  the second one to be a single tab character  and so on alternating between adding 4 spaces and a tab character   While they stuck to the green screen terminals  this was fine  Weird  but fine   The real chaos began when the development team got their shiny new Windows PCs   The PC editor they chose had its tab size set to 4 characters  and so when the code was loaded  the indentation was simply all over the place   We couldn t fix the indentation because some devs were still using the green screens  so for the year or so that it took to get the entire team transitioned to PCs  we had an absolute nightmare trying to work with code that was virtually unreadable in either one environment or the other  or more frequently  both

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Being forced to have only 1 return statement at the end of a method and making the code fall down to that   Also not being able to re-use case statements in a switch and let it drop through  I had to write a convoluted script that did a sort of loop of the switch to handle both cases in the right order   Lastly  when I started using C  I found it very odd to declare my variables at the top of a method and absolutely hated it  I d spent a good couple of years in C   and just declared them wherever I wanted  Unless for optimisation reasons I now declare all method variables at the top of a method with details of what they all do - makes maintenance A LOT easier

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Adding an 80 character comment at the end of each method so it is easy to find the end of the method   Like this   void doSomething         ----------------------------------------------------------------------------   The rationale being that    some users don t use IDE s that have code folding  Ok I will give them that   a space between methods is not clear since people may not follow the other coding standards about indenting and brace placement  hence it would be hard to find the end of a function    Not releavent  if you need to add this because people don t follow your coding standard then why should they follow this one

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Writing methods comments with pointless information for almost all methods   Not allowing multiple exit points from a method   Hungarian notation for all variables  enums  structures and even classes  e g  iMyInt  tagMySturcture  eMyEnum and CMyClass

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What drives me nuts is people suffixing the ID field of a table with the name of the table  What the hell is wrong with just ID  You re going to have to alias it anyway    for the love of all that is sacred   Imagine what your SQL statements look like when you ve got id fields called IDSEWEBLASTCUSTOMERACTION and IDSEEVENTLOGGER

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One that no one has mentioned is being forced to write unit tests for classes that are brainless getters and setters

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Probably only funny in the uk   An insurer I worked at wanted a combination  P  or  L  to denote the scope  concatenated with hungarian for the type  on all properties   The plus point was we had a property called pintMaster   Made us all fancy a drink

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An externally-written C coding standard that had the rule  don t rely on built in operator precedence  always use brackets   Fair enough  the obvious intent was to ban   a   3   6   2    in favour of   a   3    6   2     Thing was  this was enforced by a tool that followed the C syntax rules that                and array access are operators  So code like   a i  x    b i  y   d - 7    had to be written as     a i   x        b i   y   d  - 7

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The guys who wrote the compiler are probably a lot smarter than you so don t try something clever  is what one guide line document said  not quite literally

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I was told that old code should be commented out rather than being removed  in case we needed to refer to the old code  yes  the code was in source control       This doesn t seem that bad  until major changes are made   Then it becomes a nightmare  with entire sections deleted all over the code

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There must be 165 unit tests  not necessarily automated  per 1000 lines of code   That works out at one test for roughly every 8 lines     Needless to say  some of the lines of code are quite long  and functions return this pointers to allow chaining

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Applying s  to variables and methods which were deemed  safety critical  for software that was part of a control system   Couple this with the other rule about putting m  on the front of member variables and you d get something ridiculous like  s m blah     which is darn annoying to write and not very readable in my opinion   In the end some  safety expert  was supposed to gain insight by looking at the code and determining something from it by using those  s   - in practice  they didn t know c   too well so they couldn t do much other than make reports on the number of identifiers that we d marked as  safety critical    Utter nonsense

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The one that got me was similar to the other poster s  tbl  prefix for SQL table names   In this case  the prefix for all stored procedures was to be  sp   despite the fact that  sp   is a prefix used by Microsoft for system-level stored procedures in SQL Server   Well  they had their standards from an old  non-MS database and weren t about to change just because their standard might cause a stored procedure to collide with a system stored procedure and produce unpredictable results   No  that just wouldn t be proper

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To NEVER remove any code when making changes   We were told to comment all changes   Bear in mind we use source control   This policy didn t last long because developers were in an uproar about it and how it would make the code unreadable

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I worked in a VB  NET shop three years ago  where the  technical lead  decreed that all methods accepting a reference type parameter  i e   an object  must use ByRef instead of ByVal   I found this especially odd because they d asked me the ByVal ByRef-what s-the-difference question in my interview  and I explained how it worked for value types and for reference types   His explanation for the practice   Some of the newer  less-experienced devs will get confused otherwise    At the time  I was the most recently hired  and it was my first permanent  NET job   And I wasn t confused by it

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No ternary operator allowed where I currently work   int value    a  lt  b    a   b        because not everyone  gets it   If you told me   Don t use it because we ve had to rewrite them when the structures get too complicated   nested ternary operators  anyone    then I d understand  But when you tell me that some developers don t understand them    um    Sure

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Using generic numbered identifier names At my current work we have two rules which are really mean  Rule 1  Every time we create a new field in a database table we have to add additional reserve fields for future use  These reserve fields are numbered  because no one knows which data they will hold some day  The next time we need a new field we first look for an unused reserve field  So we end up with with customer reserve field 14 containing the e-mail address of the customer  At one day our boss thought about introducing reserve tables  but fortunatly we could convince him not to do it  Rule 2  One of our products is written in VB6 and VB6 has a limit of the total count of different identifier names and since the code is very large  we constantly run into this limit  As a  quot solution quot  all local variable names are numbered   Lvarlong1 Lvarlong2 Lvarstr1      Although that effectively circumvents the identifier limit  these two rules combined lead to beautiful code like this        If Lvarbool1 Then   Lvarbool2   True End If  If Lvarbool2 Or Lvarstr1  lt  gt  Lvarstr5 Then   db Execute  quot DELETE FROM customer WHERE  quot            amp   quot reserve field 12     quot   amp  Lvarstr1  amp   quot   quot   End If        You can imagine how hard it is to fix old or someone else s code    Latest update  Now we are also using  quot reserve procedures quot  for private members  Private Sub LSub1 Lvarlong1 As Long  Lvarstr1 As String    If Lvarlong1  gt   0 Then      Lvarbool1   LFunc1 Lvarstr1    Else     Lvarbool1   LFunc6     End If   If Lvarbool1 Then     LSub4 Lvarstr1   End If End Sub  EDIT  It seems that this code pattern is becoming more and more popular  See this The Daily WTF post to learn more  Astigmatism

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Maybe not the most outlandish one you ll get  but I really really hate when I have to preface database table names with  tbl

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I had to spell and grammar check my comments  They had to be complete sentences  properly capitalized and finished with a period

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We have a no code past the 80th character column that is controversial in our C   development team  Liked and code review enforced by some  Despised by others   Also  we have a very controversial C   throw    throw      specification standard  Religiously used by some and demonized by others  Both camps cite discussions and experts to enforce their respective positions

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I hate it when the use of multiple returns is banned

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We have to put a comment above every sql statement   So  you may have an sql statement as such  Select USER ID FROM USERS WHERE NAME    NAME   And you still have to have a comment above it that would say   Select USER ID from the USERS table  where name equals the name entered    Now  when the actual comment is longer than the code  and the code is simple enough for a second grader to read  i really don t see the point of commenting     But  alas  I have had to go back and add comments to statements just like this   This has been on a mainframe  coding in cobol   Team size is usually about 4 or 5  but this rule has bitten everyone here from time to time

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Marking private variables with an   just to make sure that we know we are dealing with private variables within the class  Then using php s magic methods   get and   set to provide access to each of the variables as if they were public anyway

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The worst coding standard I ve ever had to live with was insane indentation   The code had originally been written on a mainframe using 60x80 character green-screen terminals  this was quite a long time ago   The default tab size on these things was 8 characters  but the programmers at the time decided that was too big - the screen itself only showed 80 characters across  so an 8-character tab wasted a lot of space   So they decided to set the intent size for their code to 4 characters   All fair enough  you say  Except that they didn t do it by changing the tab size  They did it by making the first indentation to be 4 spaces  the second one to be a single tab character  and so on alternating between adding 4 spaces and a tab character   While they stuck to the green screen terminals  this was fine  Weird  but fine   The real chaos began when the development team got their shiny new Windows PCs   The PC editor they chose had its tab size set to 4 characters  and so when the code was loaded  the indentation was simply all over the place   We couldn t fix the indentation because some devs were still using the green screens  so for the year or so that it took to get the entire team transitioned to PCs  we had an absolute nightmare trying to work with code that was virtually unreadable in either one environment or the other  or more frequently  both

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We had to sort all the functions in classes alphabetically  to make them  easier to find   Never mind the ide had a drop down  That was too many clicks    same tech lead wrote an app to remove all comments from our source code

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An externally-written C coding standard that had the rule  don t rely on built in operator precedence  always use brackets   Fair enough  the obvious intent was to ban   a   3   6   2    in favour of   a   3    6   2     Thing was  this was enforced by a tool that followed the C syntax rules that                and array access are operators  So code like   a i  x    b i  y   d - 7    had to be written as     a i   x        b i   y   d  - 7

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Hungarian notation in general

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I completly disagree with this one  but I was forced to follow it   All HTML LINKS will ALWAYS be underlined   A while back I explained why I disagree on my blog   Note  Even Stackoverflow ONLY underlines links when you move the mouse over them

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Back in my COBOL days  we had to use three asterisks for comments  COBOL requires only one asterisk in column 7   We even had a pre-compiler that checked for this  and wouldn t compile your program if you used anything but three asterisks

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We have to put a comment above every sql statement   So  you may have an sql statement as such  Select USER ID FROM USERS WHERE NAME    NAME   And you still have to have a comment above it that would say   Select USER ID from the USERS table  where name equals the name entered    Now  when the actual comment is longer than the code  and the code is simple enough for a second grader to read  i really don t see the point of commenting     But  alas  I have had to go back and add comments to statements just like this   This has been on a mainframe  coding in cobol   Team size is usually about 4 or 5  but this rule has bitten everyone here from time to time

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We have to put a comment above every sql statement   So  you may have an sql statement as such  Select USER ID FROM USERS WHERE NAME    NAME   And you still have to have a comment above it that would say   Select USER ID from the USERS table  where name equals the name entered    Now  when the actual comment is longer than the code  and the code is simple enough for a second grader to read  i really don t see the point of commenting     But  alas  I have had to go back and add comments to statements just like this   This has been on a mainframe  coding in cobol   Team size is usually about 4 or 5  but this rule has bitten everyone here from time to time

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I absolutely hate it when someone doesn t use a naming convention  At where I worked  the lead developer  who I replaced  couldn t figure out if he wanted to use camelCase  or way over used underscores  Personally  I hate the underscores and the camel case is easier to read  but it doesn t really matter as long as you keep to one standard   PHP is especially bad at this  take a look at mysql numrows which merges the two without the caps

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My weirdest one was at a contract a couple years ago   ZombieSheep s weird one was part of it  but not the weirdest one in that company   No  the weirdest one in that company was the database naming scheme  Every table was named in all caps  with underscores between the words  Every table had a prefix  generally 1 - 6 characters  which was usually an acronym or an abbreviation of the main table name  Every field of the table was prefixed with the same prefix as well  So  let s say you have a simple schema where people can own cats or dogs  It d look like this   PER PERSON     PER ID     PER NameFirst     PER NameLast         CAT CAT     CAT ID     CAT Name     CAT Breed         DOG DOG     DOG ID     DOG Name     DOG Breed         PERCD PERSON CAT DOG  for the join data      PERCD ID     PERCD PER ID     PERCD CAT ID     PERCD DOG ID   That said  as weird as this felt initially     It grew on me  The reasons behind it made sense  after you wrapped your brain around it   as the prefixes were there to be reminders of  recommended   and enforced   table aliases when building joins  The prefixing made the majority of join queries easier to write  as it was very rare that you d have to explicitly reference a table before the field    Heck  after a while  all of us on the team  6 people on our project  were able to begin referring to tables in conversation by nothing more than the prefix  An acquired taste  to be sure     But one that grew on me  So much so that I still use it  when I have that freedom

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inserting line breaks     --------------------------------------------------------------------------------  between methods in a c  project

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We re coding after MISRA standard  The ruleset has  MUST  and  CAN  parts  and we spent hours of discussing which rules we don t want to apply and why  when someday upper management said  We want to tell our customers we re 100  compliant  Tomorrow  we apply all    Among the rules is one that says  No bit operations on signed data  Trying to find out what the rule is for  the explanation was presented  There is no guarantee about the bit representation of signed data  There is only 2s complement in the world  but the standard makes no guarantee   Anyway  doesn t sound like a big thing - who wants to declare bitcoded variables as signed   However  the holy rules checker interprets  integer promotion  as  promotion to signed  and the C standards guru says it has to be  And every bit operation does integer promotion  So instead of   a  amp     1  lt  lt  i    you have to write   a    unsigned int  a  amp   unsigned int   unsigned int  1  lt  lt  i     which is obviously much more readable and portable and all  Fortunately I found out that a shifted 1u stays unsigned  So you can reduce it to   a    unsigned int  a  amp   unsigned int   1u  lt  lt  i     Funnily  there is a rule that was not activated  Forbid using funny characters like     in  include  The DOS-corrupted folks won t believe that writing  include  bla foo h  does work even with every windows compiler and is much more portable

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I was told that old code should be commented out rather than being removed  in case we needed to refer to the old code  yes  the code was in source control       This doesn t seem that bad  until major changes are made   Then it becomes a nightmare  with entire sections deleted all over the code

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The Project i work for hard coding is a strict NO  So we were forced to hash define as below   define 1 ONE

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I ve been getting worked up over naming table columns after mysql keywords  It requires stupid column name escaping in every single query you write   SELECT this  that   key  FROM sometable WHERE such AND suchmore    Just horrible

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The worst I ve experienced was to do with code inspections   For some reason even though we had and used the diff tool of our vcs to see what had changed  when you wanted your code inspected you had to surround your changes in a file function with some comment blocks like so                80charswide          START INSPECT       some changed code             END INSPECT               80charswide           After the inspection you d have to go back and remove all those comment blocks before committing   ugh

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In Java  when contracting somewhere that shall remain nameless  Interfaces were banned  The logic  The guy in charge couldn t find implementing classes with Eclipse     Also banned - anonymous inner classes  on the grounds that the guy in charge didn t know what they were  Which made implementing a Swing GUI all kinds of fun

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My coding standards gripes are pretty tame compared to some of the heinous stuff I ve seen here  but here goes   I was on a project where some of the developers insisted on the most peculiar form of indenting I ve ever seen    if  condition             x          printf  Hello condition  n         else            y           We were developing for an embedded environment with a really rotten debugger   In fact  printf    hexdump   and the mapfile were the preferred method of debugging   This of course meant using static was forbidden and all global variables and functions had to be of the form modulename variablename   Checking in code with warnings was forbidden  not such a bad thing   but the compiler would warn about any conditional that was constant   Therefore  the old macro statement trick of do   something      while 0  was forbidden   Lastly  leaving a trailing comma on a enumerator list or initializer was considered lazy  and thus forbidden    enum debuglevel            NONE        FATAL        WARNING        VERBOSE       Naughty  naughty          As I ve said  rather tame   But as a follower of  The Ten Commandments for C Programmers   I found the unconventional bracing style absolutely maddening

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I worked at a place that had a merger between 2 companies   The  dominant  one had a major server written in K amp R C  i e  pre-ANSI    They forced the Java teams  from both offices -- probably 20 devs total  to use this format  which gleefully ignored the 2 pillars of the  brace debate  and goes straight to crazy   if   x    y              System out println  this is painful        x   0      y

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Giving numbers to our tables  like tbl47  some name

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We had to sort all the functions in classes alphabetically  to make them  easier to find   Never mind the ide had a drop down  That was too many clicks    same tech lead wrote an app to remove all comments from our source code

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Our Oracle DBA s are insisting that we prepend the schema name onto table names  ie if your schema is hr admin  your staff table would be hr admin staff  meaning the full name of the table in a cross schema query would be hr admin hr admin staff

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reverse indentation   For example       for int i   0  i  lt  10  i              myFunc                and       if something               do A               else              do B

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Once I had to do a little DLL out of my team and when it was done I had to redo the job because I shouldn t have had used  else  in the code  When I asked why I was instructed not to ask why  but the leader of the other team just  didn t get the else stuff

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I ran into two rules that I really hated on a C job a few years ago     One module per file   where  module  was defined as a C function  Function-local variables allowed only at the top of the function  so this sort of thing was illegal     if  test       int i

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I ve been getting worked up over naming table columns after mysql keywords  It requires stupid column name escaping in every single query you write   SELECT this  that   key  FROM sometable WHERE such AND suchmore    Just horrible

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Once worked on a project where underscores were banned   And I mean totally banned   So in a c  winforms app  whenever we added a new event handler  e g  for a button  we d have to  rename the default method name from buttonName Click   to something else  just to satisfy the ego of the guy that wrote the coding standards   To this day I don t know what he had against the humble underscore

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Not being able to use Reflection as the manager claimed it involved too much  magic

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at my previous job  which I gladly quit 3 months ago   database    Table names had to be uppercase  Table names had to be prefixed TBL  Fields had to be prefixed  DS   for varchar  which made no sense  NU  for numbers CD  for   bit fields   DT  for dates database fields had also to be uppercase  CD ENABLED  same with sp names  SP INFINITY USER GROUPS QRY  and database names  INFINITY  did I mention sp names were actually like that  SP  prefix  then database name SP INFINITY  then table name  SP INFINITY USER GROUPS then what the sp was actually expected to do  QRY UPD DEL INS  jesus  don t even get me started on queries that weren t just CRUD queries  all text fields had to be varchar MAX   unequivocally   numbers were either int or double  even when you could have used other type   boolean  fields  bit  were int  no reason  stored procedures had to be prefixed sp productname    asp net   c    javascript   EVERY single function had to be wrapped in try  catch    so the applications wouldn t  explode   at least that was the official reason   even when this produced things not working and not having a clue why  parameters must be prefixed with p  e g pCount  pPage scope variables had to be prefixed with w  as in  working   what the hell does that even mean   statics with g  etc  everything post framework 1 1 was offlimits  like you had any real uses for linq and generics anyways   I made it a point to enforce them to let me use jquery though  I succeded at that  at least

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Giving numbers to our tables  like tbl47  some name

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no single character variable names - even for a simple iterator like i    Had to use ii or something   I thought this was stupid   Another one - perhaps the craziest of all  but maybe not a coding standard     no STL allowed   and this was in 2007 2008   I left there soon after I found out about that nonsense   Apparently some idiots thought that there was no  standard   As in 15 years ago      I guess they missed the memo about stl being in the C   standard     Use of the stupid COM HRESULTs as return types for just about ALL methods - even if they are not COM   It was ludicrous   So now instead of returning some enumerated type or a useful value that indicates a result  etc  we had to look up what S OK or E FAIL or whatever meant in the context of each of the methods   Again  I left there shortly after that

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As I always worked self-employed freelancer project leader  I never got into someone s standards  all standards are my decisions  But  I recently found a fun piece of  coding standards document  back when I was 15   All functions must be named  ProjectName FunctionName    Well  procedural PHP  anyone  Those weren t times of hard PHP OOP yet  but still  If I wanted to use code from one project to another  I would have to rewrite all references  etc   I could have used something like  package FunctionName

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I worked in a place where the coding standard was one giant WTF  strange Hungarian notation  prefixing globals with  g  and members with  m   so there were gems like gsSomeVariable   adding  ref string sError  to every single function  instead of throwing exceptions  which was a BIG nono     The killer  though  was prefixing the function parameters with I  for input parameters  and O  for output parameters   I work now in a much better place

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The strangest was that type qualified variable naming must be used in Java  and the types where those of the columns from the database   So a java sql ResultSet had to be called tblClient etc

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Capitalizing Acronyms  DO capitalize both characters of two-character acronyms except the first word of a camel-cased identifier   System IO public void StartIO Stream ioStream    DO capitalize only the first character of acronyms with three or more characters except the first word of a camel-cased identifier   System Xml public void ProcessHtmlTag string htmlTag    DO NOT capitalize any of the characters of any acronyms  whatever their length  at the beginning of a camel-cased identifier

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Every beginning and ending brace was required to have a comment    public void HelloWorld string name       if name     Joe           Console WriteLine  Hey  Joe           if name     Joe     else         Console WriteLine  Hello      name         if name     Joe       public void HelloWorld string name    That s what led me to write my first Visual Studio plugin to automate that

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Maybe not the most outlandish one you ll get  but I really really hate when I have to preface database table names with  tbl

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It was a coding standard I did not follow myself   got in trouble for other things  but never that    We had three 19  monitors  so we could have two editors open to full screen and still have access to the desktop  Everyone else did not use comments  but used meaningful names  Extremely long meaningful names  The longest I remember was in the 80 character range  The average was around 40 50   Guess what  they didn t accurately describe the whole thing

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If I remember correctly the delphi IDE did a default indent of two spaces   Most of the legacy code for the company had three spaces and was written by the VP IT and the CEO   One day  all the programmers were talking about what we should do to make our lives easier and a contractor who knew Delphi pretty well said   Hey the ide defaults to two spaces does anyone have a problem with us doing this going forward for new code    All of us looked at each other  and pretty much thought it was a no brainer and said that we agreed     Two days later the VP and CEO found out we were going to make such a dangerous change that could  cause problems  and instructed us that we would be using three indents for everything until the two of them could accurately evaluate the impact of such a change   Now I am all for following standards  but these are the same people who thought oo programming was creating an object with one function that had all of the logic necessary to perform an action  and that source control was moving the code files to a different directory

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Anything having to do with formatting  especially place of     and other block character  is always a pain to enforce   Even with an automatic format at each source file checking  you can not be sure every developer will ever always use the same formatter  with the same formatting set of rules     And then you have to merge those files back to trunk  And you commit suicide

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Half of the team favored four-space indentation  the other half favored two-space indentation   As you can guess  the coding standard mandated three  so as to  offend all equally   a direct quote

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Doing all database queries via stored procedures in Sql Server 2000  From complex multi-table queries to simple ones like   select id  name from people  The arguments in favor of procedures were    Performance Security Maintainability   I know that the procedure topic is quite controversial  so feel free to score my answer negatively

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Postfixing   to member variables  e g   int numberofCycles     This was in C   on an open source project with a couple of developers  The main side effect was not knowing that a variable had class scope until getting to the end of the name  Not something I had thought much about before  but clearly backwards

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Maybe not the most outlandish one you ll get  but I really really hate when I have to preface database table names with  tbl

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In 1987 or so  I took a job with a company that hired me because I was one of a small handful of people who knew how to use Revelation   Revelation  if you ve never heard of it  was essentially a PC-based implementation of the Pick operating system - which  if you ve never heard of it  got its name from its inventor  the fabulously-named Dick Pick   Much can be said about the Pick OS  most of it good   A number of supermini vendors  Prime and MIPS  at least  used Pick  or their own custom implementations of it   This company was a Prime shop  and for their in-house systems they used Information    No  that was really its name   it was Prime s implementation of Pick    They had a contract with the state to build a PC-based system  and had put about a year into their Revelation project before the guy doing all the work  who was also their MIS director  decided he couldn t do both jobs anymore and hired me   At any rate  he d established a number of coding standards for their Prime-based software  many of which derived from two basic conditions  1  the use of 80-column dumb terminals  and 2  the fact that since Prime didn t have a visual editor  he d written his own   Because of the magic portability of Pick code  he d brought his editor down into Revelation  and had built the entire project on the PC using it   Revelation  of course  being PC-based  had a perfectly good full-screen editor  and didn t object when you went past column 80   However  for the first several months I was there  he insisted that I use his editor and his standards   So  the first standard was that every line of code had to be commented   Every line   No exceptions   His rationale for that was that even if your comment said exactly what you had just written in the code  having to comment it meant you at least thought about the line twice   Also  as he cheerfully pointed out  he d added a command to the editor that formatted each line of code so that you could put an end-of-line comment   Oh  yes   When you commented every line of code  it was with end-of-line comments   In short  the first 64 characters of each line were for code  then there was a semicolon  and then you had 15 characters to describe what your 64 characters did   In short  we were using an assembly language convention to format our Pick Basic code   This led to things that looked like this   EVENT LIST DATE INDEX  -1               ADD THE MOST RECENT EVENT    EVENTS LEN EVENTS                    TO THE END OF EVENT LIST    Actually  after 20 years I have finally forgotten R Basic s line-continuation syntax  so it may have looked different   But you get the idea    Additionally  whenever you had to insert multiline comments  the rule was that you use a flower box                                                                                IN CASE YOU NEVER HEARD OF ONE  OR COULDN T GUESS FROM ITS NAME          THIS IS A FLOWER BOX                                                                                                                            Yes  those closing asterisks on each line were required   After all  if you used his editor  it was just a simple editor command to insert a flower box   Getting him to relent and let me use Revelation s built-in editor was quite a battle   At first he was insistent  simply because those were the rules   When I objected that a  I already knew the Revelation editor b  it was substantially more functional than his editor  c  other Revelation developers would have the same perspective  he retorted that if I didn t train on his editor I wouldn t ever be able to work on the Prime codebase  which  as we both knew  was not going to happen as long as hell remained unfrozen over   Finally he gave in   But the coding standards were the last to go   The flower-box comments in particular were a stupid waste of time  and he fought me tooth and nail on them  saying that if I d just use the right editor maintaining them would be perfectly easy    The whole thing got pretty passive-aggressive    Finally I quietly gave in  and from then on all of the code I brought to code reviews had his precious flower-box comments   One day  several months into the job  when I d pretty much proven myself more than competent  especially in comparison with the remarkable parade of other coders that passed through that office while I worked there   he was looking over my shoulder as I worked  and he noticed I wasn t using flower-box comments   Oh  I said  I wrote a source-code formatter that converts my comments into your style when I print them out   It s easier than maintaining them in the editor   He opened his mouth  thought for a moment  closed it  went away  and we never talked about coding standards again   Both of our jobs got easier after that

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Doing all database queries via stored procedures in Sql Server 2000  From complex multi-table queries to simple ones like   select id  name from people  The arguments in favor of procedures were    Performance Security Maintainability   I know that the procedure topic is quite controversial  so feel free to score my answer negatively

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Several WTF s in one VB6 shop  I m not proud  I was hungry and needed to eat  back in 2002 - 2004   The most annoying IMHO  was setting all object references to nothing at the end of the sub function  This was to  help  the compiler reference count  It didn t matter how many tests I performed for the TA to prove it wasn t necessary  Oh no  it still had to be done  even though he had absoutely no evidence to back him up what so ever  Eventually I gave up and about a year later found an article explaining why it was pants  I bring this to the TA thinking  Got the fecker    He goes  Yeah  I ve known about that for years  but if you start changing the standard the sheep   meaning other developers  the people he worked with everyday  will screw it up   Gob sh1te   Others in the same shop    Never delete code  always comment it out  even though we were using source control   Prefixes on table names that were meaningless when I got there  but had to be enforced on new tables  Prefixing all objects with o   lo  for procedure level references  mo  for module  go  for global   Absoutely pointless in a project where every other variable was an object reference    Mostly I was writing c   there  only c   developer  so made own standards  and enforced with rigor   with occasional vb  otherwise I wouldn t have lasted

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Almost any kind of hungarian notation   The problem with hungarian notation is that it is very often misunderstood  The original idea was to prefix the variable so that the meaning was clear  For example   int appCount   0     Number of apples  int pearCount   0     Number of pears    But most people use it to determine the type   int iAppleCount   0     Number of apples  int iPearCount   0      Number of pears    This is confusing  because although both numbers are integers  everybody knows  you can t compare apples with pears

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The strangest one i saw was database table naming where the tables were prefaced with a TLA for functional area  eg accounting ACC then a 3 digit number to  overide the default sort  and then the table name   Plus this was extended into the column names as well   ACC100 AccountCode  it was a nightmare to read a query  they were so unreadable

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I once had to spell out all acronyms  even industry standard ones such as OpenGL  Variable names such as glu were not good  but we had to use graphicsLibraryUtility

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On one of my first jobs the boss said that we should always use fully qualified type names in C  and forbid usings  since we should always know which type we re using when declaring variable  parameter  etc

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The one that got me was similar to the other poster s  tbl  prefix for SQL table names   In this case  the prefix for all stored procedures was to be  sp   despite the fact that  sp   is a prefix used by Microsoft for system-level stored procedures in SQL Server   Well  they had their standards from an old  non-MS database and weren t about to change just because their standard might cause a stored procedure to collide with a system stored procedure and produce unpredictable results   No  that just wouldn t be proper

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Our old c  coding standards required that we use huge  ugly comment blocks   You know in Code Complete where Steve McConnell gives a prime example of an ugly comment macro   That   Almost an exact match     The worst thing about this was that c  is a language that already has good  and relatively unobtrusive  comment support   You d get something like this        lt summary gt      Add an item to the collection      lt  summary gt       lt parameter name  item  gt The item to add lt  parameter gt       lt returns gt Whether the addition succeeded lt  returns gt  public bool Add int item            and it d turn into this                                                                         lt summary gt          Add an item to the collection      lt  summary gt          IN    lt parameter name  item  gt The item to add lt  parameter gt          OUT   lt returns gt Whether the addition succeeded lt  returns gt                                                                     Note that StackOverflow s syntax highlighting does not do it justice  as with the default VS text scheme  the   symbol is bright green  resulting in an overpowering violation of your retinas   I can only assume the authors were really  really fond of it from previous endeavours with C C     The problem was that  even if you just had a couple of auto properties  it d take up about 50  of your screen space and add significant noise   The extra    lines also messed up R  s refactoring support     After we ditched the comment macro  we ended up spanking the whole codebase with a script that took us back to visual studio s default c  comment style

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Back in my COBOL days  we had to use three asterisks for comments  COBOL requires only one asterisk in column 7   We even had a pre-compiler that checked for this  and wouldn t compile your program if you used anything but three asterisks

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I once had to spell out all acronyms  even industry standard ones such as OpenGL  Variable names such as glu were not good  but we had to use graphicsLibraryUtility

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The one that got me was similar to the other poster s  tbl  prefix for SQL table names   In this case  the prefix for all stored procedures was to be  sp   despite the fact that  sp   is a prefix used by Microsoft for system-level stored procedures in SQL Server   Well  they had their standards from an old  non-MS database and weren t about to change just because their standard might cause a stored procedure to collide with a system stored procedure and produce unpredictable results   No  that just wouldn t be proper

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As I always worked self-employed freelancer project leader  I never got into someone s standards  all standards are my decisions  But  I recently found a fun piece of  coding standards document  back when I was 15   All functions must be named  ProjectName FunctionName    Well  procedural PHP  anyone  Those weren t times of hard PHP OOP yet  but still  If I wanted to use code from one project to another  I would have to rewrite all references  etc   I could have used something like  package FunctionName

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What drives me nuts is people suffixing the ID field of a table with the name of the table  What the hell is wrong with just ID  You re going to have to alias it anyway    for the love of all that is sacred   Imagine what your SQL statements look like when you ve got id fields called IDSEWEBLASTCUSTOMERACTION and IDSEEVENTLOGGER

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You must use only five letter table names and the last two character is reserved for IO

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Back in my C   days we were not allowed to use         lt    amp  amp   etc  there were macros for this      if  bob EQ 7 AND alice LEQ 10          blah     this was obviously to deal with the  old accidental assignment in conditional bug   however we also had the rule  put constants before variables   so  if  NULL EQ ptr     ok if  ptr EQ NULL     not ok   Just remembered  the simplest coding standard I ever heard was  Write code as if the next maintainer is a vicious psychopath who knows where you live

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Anything having to do with formatting  especially place of     and other block character  is always a pain to enforce   Even with an automatic format at each source file checking  you can not be sure every developer will ever always use the same formatter  with the same formatting set of rules     And then you have to merge those files back to trunk  And you commit suicide

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The worst I ve experienced was to do with code inspections   For some reason even though we had and used the diff tool of our vcs to see what had changed  when you wanted your code inspected you had to surround your changes in a file function with some comment blocks like so                80charswide          START INSPECT       some changed code             END INSPECT               80charswide           After the inspection you d have to go back and remove all those comment blocks before committing   ugh

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We have to put a comment above every sql statement   So  you may have an sql statement as such  Select USER ID FROM USERS WHERE NAME    NAME   And you still have to have a comment above it that would say   Select USER ID from the USERS table  where name equals the name entered    Now  when the actual comment is longer than the code  and the code is simple enough for a second grader to read  i really don t see the point of commenting     But  alas  I have had to go back and add comments to statements just like this   This has been on a mainframe  coding in cobol   Team size is usually about 4 or 5  but this rule has bitten everyone here from time to time

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Forbidden   while  true      Allowed   for

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The team size was about a dozen   For C  methods we had to put a huge XML formatted function before every function   I don t remember the format exactly but it involved XML tags nested about three to five levels deep   Here s a sketch from memory of the comment        lt comment gt       lt  comment gt       lt table gt          lt thead gt             lt tcolumns gt                lt column gt Date lt  column gt                lt column gt Modified By lt  column gt                lt column gt Comment lt  column gt             lt  tcolumns gt          lt  thead gt          lt rows gt             lt row gt                lt column gt 10 10 2006 lt  column gt                lt column gt Fred lt  column gt                lt column gt Created function lt  column gt             lt  row gt          lt  rows gt       lt parameters gt    I ve got to stop there      The downsides were many    Files were made up mostly of comments    We were not using our version control system for tracking changes to files  Writing many small functions hurt readability  Lots of scrolling  Some people did not update the comments      I used a code snippet  Emacs YAS  to add this code to my methods

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Prefix tables with dbo   Yes  as in dbo dbo tablename

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I once worked under the tyranny of the Mighty VB King   The VB King was the pure master of MS Excel and VBA  as well as databases  Hence his surname   He played with Excel while the developers worked with compilers  and challenging him on databases could have detrimental effects on your career       Of course  his immense skills gave him an unique vision of development problems and project management solutions  While not exactly coding standards in the strictest sense  the VB King regularly had new ideas about  coding standards  and  best practices  he tried  and oftentimes succeeded  to impose on us  For example    All C C   arrays shall start at index 1  instead of 0  Indeed  the use of 0 as first index of an array is obsolete  and has been superseded by Visual Basic 6 s insightful array index management  All functions shall return an error code  There are no exceptions in VB6  so why would we need them at all   i e  in C    Since  All functions shall return an error code  is not practical for functions returning meaningful types  all functions shall have an error code as first  in out  parameter  All our code will check the error codes  this led to the worst case of VBScript if-indentation I ever saw in my career    Of course  as the  else  clauses were never handled  no error was actually found until too late   Since we re working with C   COM  starting this very day  we will code all our DOM utility functions in Visual Basic  ASP 115 errors are evil  For this reason  we will use On Error Resume Next in our VBScript ASP code to avoid them  XSL-T is an object oriented language  Use inheritance to resolve your problems  dumb surprise almost broke my jaw open this one day   Exceptions are not used  and thus should be removed  For this reason  we will uncheck the checkbox asking for destructor call in case of exception unwinding  it took days for an expert to find the cause of all those memory leaks  and he almost went berserk when he found out they had willingly ignored  and hidden  his technical note about checking the option again  sent handfuls of weeks before   catch all exceptions in the COM interface of our COM modules  and dispose them silently  this way  instead of crashing  a module would only appear to be faster    Shiny     As we used the   ber error handling described above  it even took us some time to understand what was really happening    You can t have both speed and correct results  can you    Starting today  our code base will split into four branches  We will manage their synchronization and integrate all bug corrections evolutions by hand    All but the C C   arrays  VB DOM utility functions and XSL-T as OOP language were implemented despite our protests  Of course  over the time  some were discovered  ahem  broken  and abandoned altogether   Of course  the VB King credibility never suffered for that  Among the higher management  he remained a  top gun  technical expert     This produced some amusing side effects  as you can see by following the link  What is the best comment in source code you have ever encountered

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In Delphi we had to change from  if something then begin       end else begin      end    to  if something then begin       end else begin      end    in a project with 1 5 million lines of code  Imagine how easy this was on source control  diff  and merge  It also led to forgetting begin and not noticing it right away when the compiler announced a superflous end

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In Delphi we had to change from  if something then begin       end else begin      end    to  if something then begin       end else begin      end    in a project with 1 5 million lines of code  Imagine how easy this was on source control  diff  and merge  It also led to forgetting begin and not noticing it right away when the compiler announced a superflous end

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At a major UK bank I was brought in to act as a design authority on a new  NET system   Their rules state that the database tables had to be a maximum of 8 characters long  with the project code  a 5 digit code  as the prefix   They were enforcing old DB2 rules onto Windows projects sigh

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Perhaps one of the more frustrating situations I ve encountered was where people insisted on prefixing Stored Procedures with the prefix  sp       If you don t know why this is a bad thing to do  check out this blog entry here   In a nutshell  if SQL Server is looking for a Stored Procedure with an sp  prefix  it will check the master database first  which it won t find unless the SP is actually in the master database    Assuming it isn t in the master DB  SQL Server assumes the SP isn t in the cache and therefore recompiles it     It may sound like a small thing  but it adds up in high volume or busy database server environments

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Hungarian notation in general

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Doing all database queries via stored procedures in Sql Server 2000  From complex multi-table queries to simple ones like   select id  name from people  The arguments in favor of procedures were    Performance Security Maintainability   I know that the procedure topic is quite controversial  so feel free to score my answer negatively

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When using SQL Server  which has such big limits on table name length that I ve never personally bumped into them  we were forced to use the naming convention from the older mainframe system  even though the new system never interacted with the mainframe database   Because of the tiny limit on the table names  the convention was to give all the tables codenames  rather than meaningful descriptions   So  on a system that could quite happily have had the  customer  table called  ThisIsTheCustomerTable   instead it was called  TBRC03AA   And the next table was called  TBRC03AB   and the next one called  TBRC03AC   and so on   That made the SQL really easy to understand  especially a month after you d written it

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Not being allowed to use Pointers or GOTO   In C  none-the-less    Thankfully this was merely a  software engineering  class  which I was able to graduate and then enter the  real world

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I absolutely hate it when someone doesn t use a naming convention  At where I worked  the lead developer  who I replaced  couldn t figure out if he wanted to use camelCase  or way over used underscores  Personally  I hate the underscores and the camel case is easier to read  but it doesn t really matter as long as you keep to one standard   PHP is especially bad at this  take a look at mysql numrows which merges the two without the caps

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I completly disagree with this one  but I was forced to follow it   All HTML LINKS will ALWAYS be underlined   A while back I explained why I disagree on my blog   Note  Even Stackoverflow ONLY underlines links when you move the mouse over them

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One that no one has mentioned is being forced to write unit tests for classes that are brainless getters and setters

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In a large group at my company  we use C   almost exclusively  Passing by non-const reference is forbidden   If you want to modify a parameter to a function  you must pass it by pointer   We have an internal flame war over the pros  easier to identify function calls that can modify variables  and cons  ridiculousness  having to deal with possible NULL pointers when you want a parameter to be required  about once a year

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Applying s  to variables and methods which were deemed  safety critical  for software that was part of a control system   Couple this with the other rule about putting m  on the front of member variables and you d get something ridiculous like  s m blah     which is darn annoying to write and not very readable in my opinion   In the end some  safety expert  was supposed to gain insight by looking at the code and determining something from it by using those  s   - in practice  they didn t know c   too well so they couldn t do much other than make reports on the number of identifiers that we d marked as  safety critical    Utter nonsense

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no single character variable names - even for a simple iterator like i    Had to use ii or something   I thought this was stupid   Another one - perhaps the craziest of all  but maybe not a coding standard     no STL allowed   and this was in 2007 2008   I left there soon after I found out about that nonsense   Apparently some idiots thought that there was no  standard   As in 15 years ago      I guess they missed the memo about stl being in the C   standard     Use of the stupid COM HRESULTs as return types for just about ALL methods - even if they are not COM   It was ludicrous   So now instead of returning some enumerated type or a useful value that indicates a result  etc  we had to look up what S OK or E FAIL or whatever meant in the context of each of the methods   Again  I left there shortly after that

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Hungarian notation in general

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To NEVER remove any code when making changes   We were told to comment all changes   Bear in mind we use source control   This policy didn t last long because developers were in an uproar about it and how it would make the code unreadable

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A buddy of mine encountered this rule while working at a government job   The use of     pre or post  was completely banned   The reason  Different compilers might interpret it differently

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Use   or m  in front of global variable when you can simply use the keyword this  when you need to access global variable

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I implemented and modified an open-source asp classic shopping cart  that is mostly a long string of dailyWTF candidates   that started every variable with a lower case p   As in  pTax Amount or pFirst Name   There was no explanation for this  tho I read somewhere on one of their forums it was to avoid using reserved words like State - you d have pState instead   They also append temp to things kinda randomly  like rsTemp  and connTemp  As opposed to the permanent record sets and database connections  I guess

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Our old c  coding standards required that we use huge  ugly comment blocks   You know in Code Complete where Steve McConnell gives a prime example of an ugly comment macro   That   Almost an exact match     The worst thing about this was that c  is a language that already has good  and relatively unobtrusive  comment support   You d get something like this        lt summary gt      Add an item to the collection      lt  summary gt       lt parameter name  item  gt The item to add lt  parameter gt       lt returns gt Whether the addition succeeded lt  returns gt  public bool Add int item            and it d turn into this                                                                         lt summary gt          Add an item to the collection      lt  summary gt          IN    lt parameter name  item  gt The item to add lt  parameter gt          OUT   lt returns gt Whether the addition succeeded lt  returns gt                                                                     Note that StackOverflow s syntax highlighting does not do it justice  as with the default VS text scheme  the   symbol is bright green  resulting in an overpowering violation of your retinas   I can only assume the authors were really  really fond of it from previous endeavours with C C     The problem was that  even if you just had a couple of auto properties  it d take up about 50  of your screen space and add significant noise   The extra    lines also messed up R  s refactoring support     After we ditched the comment macro  we ended up spanking the whole codebase with a script that took us back to visual studio s default c  comment style

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At a former job     Normal  tables begin with T   System  tables  usually lookups  begin with TS   except when they don t because somebody didn t feel like it that day  Cross-reference tables begin with TSX  All field names begin with F    Yes  that s right  All of the fields  in every single table  So that we can tell it s a field

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Strangest was  this must be coded in C      Presumably I m being hired for my expertise   If my expert opinion says another language would do the job better  then that other language should be the one used   Telling me which tool I should use is about the same as telling an automobile mechanic that he s only allowed to use metric wrenches   And only wrenches

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At a former job     Normal  tables begin with T   System  tables  usually lookups  begin with TS   except when they don t because somebody didn t feel like it that day  Cross-reference tables begin with TSX  All field names begin with F    Yes  that s right  All of the fields  in every single table  So that we can tell it s a field

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If I remember correctly the delphi IDE did a default indent of two spaces   Most of the legacy code for the company had three spaces and was written by the VP IT and the CEO   One day  all the programmers were talking about what we should do to make our lives easier and a contractor who knew Delphi pretty well said   Hey the ide defaults to two spaces does anyone have a problem with us doing this going forward for new code    All of us looked at each other  and pretty much thought it was a no brainer and said that we agreed     Two days later the VP and CEO found out we were going to make such a dangerous change that could  cause problems  and instructed us that we would be using three indents for everything until the two of them could accurately evaluate the impact of such a change   Now I am all for following standards  but these are the same people who thought oo programming was creating an object with one function that had all of the logic necessary to perform an action  and that source control was moving the code files to a different directory

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In Java  I am currently discouraged to use boolean functions as a predicate in a test        if  list isEmpty          must be rewritten       if  list isEmpty      true        and       if   list isEmpty          must be rewritten       if  list isEmpty      false        because  it is clearer like that    To me   list isEmpty      true  has 2 verbs   is  and  equals   in one phrase without a connective   I can t make it feel right

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I worked in a place where the coding standard was one giant WTF  strange Hungarian notation  prefixing globals with  g  and members with  m   so there were gems like gsSomeVariable   adding  ref string sError  to every single function  instead of throwing exceptions  which was a BIG nono     The killer  though  was prefixing the function parameters with I  for input parameters  and O  for output parameters   I work now in a much better place

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The creator of the file  doesn t have to put any code in  has to put their name in the file  So if you create stubs or placeholders  you  own  them forever   The guy who actually writes the code doesn t add his name  we had source control so that we d know  always who to blame

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Back in my C   days we were not allowed to use         lt    amp  amp   etc  there were macros for this      if  bob EQ 7 AND alice LEQ 10          blah     this was obviously to deal with the  old accidental assignment in conditional bug   however we also had the rule  put constants before variables   so  if  NULL EQ ptr     ok if  ptr EQ NULL     not ok   Just remembered  the simplest coding standard I ever heard was  Write code as if the next maintainer is a vicious psychopath who knows where you live

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At a former job     Normal  tables begin with T   System  tables  usually lookups  begin with TS   except when they don t because somebody didn t feel like it that day  Cross-reference tables begin with TSX  All field names begin with F    Yes  that s right  All of the fields  in every single table  So that we can tell it s a field

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In a large group at my company  we use C   almost exclusively  Passing by non-const reference is forbidden   If you want to modify a parameter to a function  you must pass it by pointer   We have an internal flame war over the pros  easier to identify function calls that can modify variables  and cons  ridiculousness  having to deal with possible NULL pointers when you want a parameter to be required  about once a year

[coding-style] What was the strangest coding standard rule that you were forced to follow?

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