Through my college career it seems standard for professors to encourage, sometimes even require certain coding practices with the intent to make code look neat and visually pleasing to anyone who reads it. While it’s true that the extra indentation in a line of code or anything like it won’t make the code run faster and in fact it’s essentially useless when it comes to the actual running of a program, it is necessary, at the very least helpful in future productivity.
The fact is, the actual writing of code is done by live human people. Thus these live human people have to actually read any code they’re debugging, maintaining, modifying, or writing. So having code that is easy to read and appealing to the eyes I imagine will be helpful during large projects. This will make it easier to debug, easier for anyone else to read and modify program code which I imagine will be helpful when working for companies on the job market and will in fact be useful in allowing me to offer myself as a more appealing programmer.
I think working with IntelliJ and ESLint is well worth it so far. Similar to the Eclipse IDE, IntelliJ helps a lot with debugging and preventing smaller less noticeable errors like missing semi-colons or bad syntax errors. And working with ESLint has been a pleasant experience as well. Often I think most students will only have a small idea on what “quality coding standards” are. However when using ESLint it offers students a chance to force themselves to learn a type of “quality coding standard” which they will be able to learn, get used to and use in future projects.