Thinking through design criteria, trying to perfect them, asking all these small questions can be a joyful, creative act in itself. I think it's great when good developers can engage in heated debate as to which is the most solid design, backing away from the desire to be buzzword compliant and come up with a solid design.
In the end, I'd rather write code people looked at and said "That's elegant" than code that people looked at and said "that's clever."
This being said, if you don't realize that all of this is a creative endeavor then things will be formalized to the point of killing that creative spark.
I do think coding standards exist for a reason, but also that they should be no longer than necessary. Indeed, one issue with writing long coding standards is that usually they are a form of premature optimization ;-)
Thinking through design criteria, trying to perfect them, asking all these small questions can be a joyful, creative act in itself. I think it's great when good developers can engage in heated debate as to which is the most solid design, backing away from the desire to be buzzword compliant and come up with a solid design.
In the end, I'd rather write code people looked at and said "That's elegant" than code that people looked at and said "that's clever."
This being said, if you don't realize that all of this is a creative endeavor then things will be formalized to the point of killing that creative spark.
I do think coding standards exist for a reason, but also that they should be no longer than necessary. Indeed, one issue with writing long coding standards is that usually they are a form of premature optimization ;-)