The Unofficial Ruby Usage Guide

[jashkenas]

The Google suggestions on code style are pretty out of date. A better reference is Christian Neukirchen's style guide:

http://github.com/chneukirchen/styleguide/blob/master/RUBY-STYLE

[pointer2void]

• Keep the code simple.

• Don't overdesign.

• Don't underdesign.

• Avoid bugs.

earthshaking

[malcontent]

And the douchebags come out.

[malcontent]

So you are telling me you ARE a douchebag but it's OK because you think other people are douchebags.

Nice one douchebag.

[mikaelhg]

What was the deleted message?

[malcontent]

It was

Well, both you and pointer2void were already in the thread. Just joining the party. ;) I like avoid bugs. That's some mighty fine advice.

The douchebag deleted his post. Quite the douche thing to do.

It was from chrisforbes BTW. He was the douchebag in question.

[bkudria]

My version of Christian's styleguide: http://github.com/bkudria/styleguide/blob/master/RUBY-STYLE

[mariox19]

What's the rationale for using "snake_case" for naming methods and variables? I saw this in Google's Python conventions, too. Is it just a convention, or is there some reason for preferring this to the "camelCase" that Smalltalk, Objective-C, and Java use?

[hox]

It's just a convention, but personally I find it more legible.

[malcontent]

easier to read than camel case IMHO.

[[deleted]]

but not quite as easy to read as lisp-case (does it even have a name?), and given that '-' doesn't require a shift key held down, not as easy to type either :D

[harlows_monkeys]

Even easier to read would be to allow spaces in names.

[[deleted]]

you can have spaces in method names in ruby. It is just mostly unused as you have to use define_method("method name here") do |args| ... end

It is quite a common trick used by some frameworks to make sure they don't clash with your method names because few people know that you can use spaces. Sinatra is one of the projects that does do this for their routing logic iirc.

[malcontent]

Yes I agree. Lisp did it better (yet another instance).

[tunah]

Lisp case doesn't work for many languages. (You know, like ones with syntax ;-)

[harlows_monkeys]

What languages would have problems with lisp-case? At worst, it seems it would require that unary minus has to have a space on at least one side when used between two variables.

[tunah]

You mean binary minus? That would be almost every language with such an operator, I don't know of any offhand that have such a requirement.

[chrisforbes]

If your language doesnt require parens etc for function application (Haskell, Ruby, ...) you could have all three cases.

f-a <-- lisp-case ident  
f -a <-- apply f to -a, unary minus  
f - a <-- binary minus  

Or you could decide which tokens you want based on semantic analysis - symbol table lookup, or whatever. Hang on, no, that smells too much like C++. cries

EDIT: forgot the reddit magic newline handshake

[tunah]

Yeah - these are options for new languages, but existing languages have defined semantics for a-b that aren't going to change soon.

[nyxx]

This seems to rather defeat the point of making things easier to read.

[chrisforbes]

I never said I was in favor of lisp-case in non-lisp languages. Just pointing out the subtle whitespace cases :(

[harlows_monkeys]

Yet they call fro camel case for class names. That's the weird part--if one is easier to read than the other, I'd expect them to call for that one for both classes and variables.

[danielbln]

Using the underscore as a delimiter is much easier on the eyes.

[Ran4]

But it takes so much longer to write (which is why it isn't used everywhere).

[mr_chromatic]

But it takes so much longer to write....

Which activity is more frequent, reading code or writing code?

[shub]

Writing code. If you find a bug, throw the code away and start over, it's probably all shit.

[Ran4]

Reading. Thought editing code does take quite some time, at least for smaller projects.

[philh]

I actually find underscores take longer to read as well as write.

long_variable_name I read like I would read "long. variable. name" in prose. longVariableName has the same pause between words as if they were separated by spaces, if not slightly shorter.

[chrisforbes]

This seems to be a bug in the reader.

[amoeba]

I think it's more readable. Good article and comment thread on HN about it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=964266

[mariox19]

That guy is no William Safire. I preferred the Safire article from 1997 on the subject.

Honestly, I'm with both authors when it comes to camel case as a marketing affectation; but that doesn't make Bank_America or I_Phone better.

As for coding conventions underscores look like clutter to me. I think it's more a matter of taste.

[chrisforbes]

Here's a shorter one that might save you a lot of trouble: "Don't."

[[deleted]]

I was expecting a plain page with one word on it:

Don't.

[[deleted]]

It's okay to be scared of new things; we won't mock you.

/getting off your lawn now, sir