There are any number of standards and best practices that surround development, at least once the code base(s) involved gets above a certain level of complexity. They are considered as such because they solve (or prevent) various difficulties that will likely arise if they aren't followed. A fair number of them also focus, if indirectly, on some aspect of future-proofing code, at least from the perspective of trying to make it easier for a new developer (or the same developer, maybe years later) to understand what the code does, how to find specific chunks of code, or, perhaps, to extend or refactor it.
Those guidelines fall, roughly, into two categories, no matter the programming language:
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Standards for code: Guidelines and concepts that focus on the structure and organization of code, though not necessarily on how that code functions – more...