What are the advantage and disadvantage of coding standards?

Answer 1

Advantages

• Consistent conventions, patterns and/or processes to follow
• Standards should be treated as an INTERFACE for programmers to read and write codes

Disadvantages

• Standards means the rules are enforced. To enforce them, code review must be conducted. To perform code reviews, more rules will need to be established (snowball effect)

• Need to have the authority and another set of rules to conduct code reviews (to enforce the standards). (I've encountered the violation of standards being spotted in the code reviews, mentioning them were the only outcome. The reviews were just a formality to kill time.)
• When it's wrong, it may be a rotten apple to ruin the whole basket of them (the entire standards)
• Standards means deviation will happen. Any deviation will need to be approved. But then, when there are more approved deviations than the standards, the standards may be meaningless.
• Standards should be reviewed from time to time: today's good idea will be bad tomorrow
• With a "standard" become a habit for quite awhile, it will be hard to break away from it
• The standards were not carefully thought out. The rules or principles were carried over to a different programming language, but cannot or should not be applied when codes are written in a different one (code conversion).
• One computer language should have its own coding standards if there are standards. When there are 2 computer languages used at the same time (C# and Sql is fairly common to work together), the rules may be very confusing and even against each other.