27.10.2014, 23:48
Indentation is important, that's not even up for discussion.
It's obvious that your friend has no idea what he's talking about, it also seems pretty obvious (to me) that he has never written big and/or complex programs.
When doing something, coding or not coding related, there's always a part that if small enough can be done in the most messy way you'd want and still end up fine. But when you start going big that all changes. I've listed a few reasons below.
Consider these:
- No decent programmer will touch code that's not indented, so don't expect any help
- If you work with someone on the same code and don't indent, you'll be kicked out faster than you can say "hi, my name is.."
- When you look back at your own code to find a bug, it'll take you way longer than it'd have taken to indent
- When you revisit your code after a few months, you will not be able to understand a single bit
- Decent IDEs do it automagically!!
I could go on for quite a while about this.
TL ; DR Indent or stop programming
It's obvious that your friend has no idea what he's talking about, it also seems pretty obvious (to me) that he has never written big and/or complex programs.
When doing something, coding or not coding related, there's always a part that if small enough can be done in the most messy way you'd want and still end up fine. But when you start going big that all changes. I've listed a few reasons below.
Consider these:
- No decent programmer will touch code that's not indented, so don't expect any help
- If you work with someone on the same code and don't indent, you'll be kicked out faster than you can say "hi, my name is.."
- When you look back at your own code to find a bug, it'll take you way longer than it'd have taken to indent
- When you revisit your code after a few months, you will not be able to understand a single bit
- Decent IDEs do it automagically!!
I could go on for quite a while about this.
TL ; DR Indent or stop programming