John Fletcher wrote:
One thing I really like about Java compared to PHP is that there’s an official coding standard.
If the Official Coding Standard just... jumped off a cliff, would you?
Bearing that in mind... I’m starting to learn Ruby and noticed there doesn’t appear to be an official coding standard, nor for Rails. This document basically claims to be a de facto standard, is that true The Unofficial Ruby Usage Guide? If so I will follow their conventions. Or is there a better resource? Is the community fairly consistent in their coding style? I find the Java community is fairly consistent, the PHP community rather the opposite.
Ruby is supported by a real community, not a corporate oligarchy. We have no motive to pay some flunky to write up a document full of our leaders' whims and proclivities. Yet our coding standard really does exist - it is the amalgam of our best literature. For example:
- 2 spaces for indentation
- under_bar not CamelCase
- omit unused keywords, such as return
- omit top-level parens
- the closer to correct English grammar the better
- do-end on multi-line blocks
- {} on blocks followed by .methods
- cram everything onto one line (then wrap it funkily)
You will notice that not all of our standards make sense. Making them official would only exacerbate this problem.
Ruby's incredibly rich syntax powers our style. For example, the operators 'or' and 'and' associate more loosely than '=', so we can write:
match.xpath('*').each do |child|
issue = match_nodes(child, node) and
return issue
end
That notation looks unfamiliar, and it saves a couple of lines - without cramming. It also obeys the perfectly universal coding standard, "Always promote the positive path thru a method, and demote the negative or failing path. Make the failing path low or to the right, and run the positive path down along the left."
The Official Java Standard doubtless enforced that too...
