As far as I am concerned, it is always best not to put "form over substance"....

Personally, I often write code which many might consider "childish" because I tend to create variables like:

Code:

$my_flag_used_for_processing_something

.... versus how "many others" code ....

Code:

$f

In fact, I have been going though someone else's PHP code yesterday (making changes), it is so cryptic it takes a lot of time because of all the cryptic var names and complex code.

On the other hand, in the Javascript, HTML and CSS world -- the Web Dev World --- many believe that code should be very short and so very cryptic, for performance reasons (takes a shorter time to download and less space to store in the browser, etc).

So, we must be careful to impose our "best practices" on others.

As the "main poobah admin and web developer here", I do not want to see people coming down hard on others who do not code according to their "best practices"; however, it is always good to lead by example.

I was once on a mountain top temple talking to the most senior monk and I was asking about a particular monk who walked around in the garden smoking a cigar.

The wise elder monk mentioned to me that everyone has their own life experiences and things they collect and "become" as they journey in life. We should not worry about what others do or do not do; but focus on ourselves.

Maybe someone here is busy, and they are helping someone out who asks a question, and they write some quick messy code to help out someone, then they jump back to work or to family matters. It is not right, in my view, for us to hold that person to some "standard" when they are already helping out someone.

That is why I often reformat other's code and wrap code tags around other's code here; because I figure if someone took the time to write a lot of code to help someone, it's not any trouble to me to spend a few seconds to format it. That's also what our great moderator's do.

So, in closing, while I certainly would be very pleased if everyone wrote great, easy to follow code, I prefer we lead by example, not by instructing others how to write or format their own code. As long as they use "code tags" that is already good.

My final thought is this...... which I learned many years ago as a coder....

We can always look at code written before us and find ways to improve it... or to say "that code is really **** ... " and people will say the same when they view our code written today in the future.

The fact of the matter is that when someone writes code, we do not know if they were given three weeks to write it, or three minutes. So it is mostly unfair to judge the code which others write.

Best is to just LEAD BY EXAMPLE... and not worry about others... unless you are a moderator, then add those code tags!!! LOL

THANKS!