On Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 05:25:04PM +0200, Maros Zatko wrote:
Hi everybody,
I'd love to ask you if we have some coding style guidelines. If we don't I'd like to propose creating such thing and start to enforce it in a review process.
To my knowledge, all we really have is a notion of what others have done in the past. But I think it would be a good idea to start to write those things up on a wiki page.
some of the guidelines ideas are:
- 2 spaces over tabs
- fuzzy (i.e. non-strict limit) for 80 chars per line (and yes - 120
chars are way too much)
I'm not sure I completely agree with this one. There is certainly some point at which lines are too long, but I'm not sure 80 characters is it. It feels like a carryover from VT100 days, and I can view considerably more than 80 characters on even my 13" laptop at home.
What I'd rather see is a guideline like, "Try to keep your lines to 120 characters at most. If you cannot easily refactor code to use shorter lines, here is the recommended best practice of spanning multiple lines...."
- using instance variables only when you *really* need it
- 'do...end' and curly braces conventions (?)
- CamelCaseOnlyForClassNames
Some of these are standard Ruby conventions, e.g., using curly braces only for one-liners, vs. do..end for multi-line blocks, or CamelCaseOnlyForClassNames. I seem to recall having read a really great overview of many common Ruby conventions in the past, but, of course, I cannot find it now.
Personally, I'd rather our list was more a set of "Best Practices" or "Preferred Conventions" to help us be more consistent, versus a set of mandatory rules. Some larger projects (which shall remain nameless) seem to irritate a lot of people by having rigid requirements that presumably started off as well-intentioned guidelines to help keep things consistent/structured, but turned into a set of hurdles that don't always have any benefit.
Do you want to take a stab at throwing some of these up the wiki, and others can add more (or object to some of them)? I have a few more I can think of adding.
-- Matt