On Teaching Style and Maintainability

Computer science has existed as a separate discipline for more than 50 years, and in that time we have learned a lot about what is important to the field and how to teach it to new entrants. We have long agreed that every self-respecting computer scientist should have a solid grounding in fundamental areas such as algorithms, discrete mathematics, programming languages, data structures, operating systems, software engineering, etc. But in this article, I will argue that there is a major missing component: style and readability. I’ll try to convince you that style matters, and I will provide suggestions for how we might encourage better style from both new and experienced software developers.