A recent poll wanted to know if programming standards are still in use in development organisations... and if they are controlled. The question was: does your organisation implement programming/coding standards?

None...............................20%
Yes, but without control.....49%
Yes, with control................31%

Participants: 369

Source: http://www.methodsandtools.com

A majority of the participating organisations have coding standards... and a majority does not control them ;o) What is the situation at your location? Does this lack of control really hurt?

It's funny you should ask that. When we decided to do a rewrite of our application in the office, we decided that strict coding standards should be applied. We went down to which quotation types (single and double quotes) should be used where, indentation rules, etc.

Well, we had a guy who worked for the company that contracted out to us, and he apparently had some grandiose ideas. He was sure to make sure to let us know that he had written code that was maintainable for 8 years, and worked with some of the best object oriented programming professors in the world at his attended university. We got into a debate about OOP, and the use of accessors. Now, the code was PHP4, and we had planned on soon moving to PHP5 (which features the magic accessors), so we determined not to use them. We went back and forth, until finally, he sent out an email that said something like:

"This discussion is over! Either I'm the head of this projector and we will follow my coding standards or I'm not the head of this project. If I'm not the head, then don't expect to me to be around for much longer"

Two days later, he gave his notice. Good riddance to bad team-players... Simply anecdotal, but everyone in our office continues to this day to poke fun at that guy...

Yes, our company strictly implementes the coding standard for some reasons; the complexity of the program will be manageable; easy to troubleshoot or determine error beyond a long code,I just want to add something, Do you want to detect or look for error with beyong 5k lines of code?!simply no,right??; give the client ease to understand the whole code functionality.

We don't really have standards right now, but we're working on setting them in place.

I see how they are helpful, but I would rather stay away from them, that way each coder can develop how they feel comfortable and they can get fresh ideas when they do need to review other code. If they can't understand the code someone else wrote well enough to maintain it, then they can get a better understanding of their language along the way.

we have standards, but by some they are treated more like recommendations...
or they just seem natural