MATLAB-Coding-Guidelines Discussions

[dgarriso]

👋 Welcome!

We’re using Discussions as a place to connect with other members of our community. We hope that you:

• Ask questions you’re wondering about.
• Share ideas.
• Engage with other community members.
• Welcome others and are open-minded. Remember that this is a community we
  build together 💪.

To get started, comment below with an introduction of yourself and tell us about what you do with this community.

[michellehirsch]

I’m Michelle Hirsch. I’ve been working with MATLAB for over 30 years, the last 25 at MathWorks. I supported Dave in the development of these standards. My personal goal was to help us preserve the familiar, classic casual programming style that makes MATLAB so approachable while tilting strongly towards the more disciplined and formal approach that has been demonstrated to help teams develop software more efficiently and effectively.

Im looking forward to hearing what everyone thinks about the standards.

[sullyj42]

I really appreciate the effort to provide some guidelines here. I assume the intended uses is for each team to tweak the codeAnalyzerConfiguration.json as they see fit?

For large teams, I imagine this could be configured to run as a pre-commit hook, or as a code-quality check in a CI pipeline. Do you have any examples of such? Might be nice to see a demonstration somewhere like this.

[michellehirsch]

Yes, that's what we are thinking - just fork the repo and modify the markdown and corresponding codeAnalyzerConfiguration.json with your team/org preferences. Running in a CI pipeline should be quite straightforward using buildtool's built in code analysis task, but we can consider creating an example.

[sullyj42]

Any attempt to include documentation in the standard? For example, I commonly see doc-blocks include sections for inputs, outputs, warnings, errors, etc. It would be very nice to check
a) These sections exist
b) The information is correct (all arguments covered, no extra arguments, correct order, etc)

[michellehirsch]

Nice idea, @sullyj42. There aren't well-accepted standards, beyond copying the old style MathWorks used in MATLAB code files, so it's not clear to me what to recommend right now.

@rpurser47 and I are working with some others inside MathWorks on what next generation documentation-authoring in MATLAB could look like; we'd both like to see the syntax for MATLAB function help fleshed out to support this. Which is to say I hope that a clearer standard will start to emerge that this standard could reference.

Feel free to create an issue for this discussion so it isn't lost in this discussion thread.