>As long there is a simple and clear code structure, it is a good thing
I've seen sprawling, massive ladder logic jumbles that made no sense and were completely undocumented before. Once visual-style plc things reach beyond a certain level of complexity, if they are undocumented they can be a nightmare to use.
I don't know if this says more about the medium itself or that a lot of PLC guys just don't know or were never taught proper standards to follow in writing their code. Either way I've seen a lot of really bad PLC code.
Sure, I should have maybe made my point clearer and say PLC programmers in my experience are often guys with no programming background who have an Associates in automation technology or something similar from a local community college.
They have often not been taught basic things like don't name a variables or identifiers that have no significance like 'b123' and are in a workplace where as long as the lines are running properly nobody cares. There are leagues of difference between what I would consider a pretty messy codebase at say, some B2B enterprise software company, and a large codebase maintained by people who actively don't know how to program for lack of a better description.
As you can imagine, I've seen also a lot more or less funny ladder logic.
And yes is true, most plc programmer don't have a "just software" background and yes a lot of plc software is not super pretty but with the old IDEs it was also not so easy.
I've seen sprawling, massive ladder logic jumbles that made no sense and were completely undocumented before. Once visual-style plc things reach beyond a certain level of complexity, if they are undocumented they can be a nightmare to use.
I don't know if this says more about the medium itself or that a lot of PLC guys just don't know or were never taught proper standards to follow in writing their code. Either way I've seen a lot of really bad PLC code.