From personal experience, from what I can tell, each professor has their requirements with coding standards. Although not all of them differ drastically from one another, having to know and understand the nuances between each professor’s required standards is annoying at times. However, I do agree that coding standards are an essential skill to have as a software engineer. It is comparable to grammar and conventional writing standards. Without them, our essays, papers, and other pieces of writing would look like alien gibberish. All human languages have their form of sentence structure, so why wouldn’t programming languages? I’m pretty sure all of us at some point have come across the infuriating dilemma where someone else’s writing seems horrible and nonsensical because of the lack of structure. So in that same vein, coding standards serve a similar purpose to that of writing standards: That is to help others read and make sense of what we are trying to convey. Code readability is especially an important factor in developing software as large projects require many people, so your code must be understandable to everyone who may read or use it.
Although both writing and coding standards serve similar purposes, their implementation into what we write are vastly different. The rules of writing, on the one hand, are more difficult since error checking relies on our skill and experience. And since these skills and experiences can vary from person to person, their standards of writing can differ too. On the other hand, coding standards are a bit more straightforward since it is carried out by specific limitations set by a tool like Linters. Being able to keep up with the standard, however, can be infuriating and take a painstaking amount of diligence as any small little detail can or may be confusing to fix. One of the examples that come to mind is the use of underscore functions in IntelliJ, despite having the underscore library loaded in my HTML file and running fine in Chrome, the javascript file warns about the underscore function is undefined, and therefore my code does not meet the coding standards.
All in all, I think that coding and writing standards are a vital skill to learn. Although it can be confusing as some people have their preferences for how code should be written and writing standards can also vary from person to person-which makes sense. Fortunately, most coding standards tend to follow the same “guidelines” with little differences here and there and forming writing standards can be developed by reading more advanced forms of writing.