There's another discussion in MO, but since it's come up here publicly, I'll just add that our
SCJD Links page links to the Sun style guide, not Coop, and the Sun guide is definitely promoted by the regulars in the Developer Cert forum for anyone doing
SCJD.
[Jason]: To truly get students to learn, perhaps we should introduce different style guides for different assignments, but that would probably put more work on the nitpickers.
[Matthew]: This is a fantastic idea, although it does make it difficult for the nitpickers. Would it be easier if it alternated by "schools" and have each nitpicker work only with that "school." I like the idea too, of course. In an ideal world the additional work would be minimal, if indeed the cattle drivers have learned to take in a new style guide and follow it, regardless of their own codeing preferences. If there
is substantial new work generated by this, getting people to adjust to a differnt style, then that also seems to indicate (to me) that there's that much more
need to break people out of the one syle they've learned to code in thus far. There are other ways in which additional work comes up - a few nitpickers would have to become
really familiar with Sun style if they're not already, and the sample code for certain assignments/schools would have to be converted to the new style. But those are one-time costs, and hopefully not too big. Of course I don't know that much about the inner workings of Cattle Drive, maybe there are other problems here. But I hope the Cattle Drive staff will give these ideas further consideration.
[ October 03, 2003: Message edited by: Jim Yingst ]