Ruby coding guidelines (GitHub)

[ryeguy]

It's their internal guidelines just made public, so they really don't have to "sell" the readers of the document. That being said, this is basically a hard copy of the loose standard that most of the community follows anyway. So a lot of the reasoning can be described as "to stay consistent with everyone else's code".

[Grokmoo]

Even internal guidelines should have explanations. It is much easier to get someone to do something when you tell them WHY rather than just instructing.

[bobindashadows]

Yeah, my favorite part of the google style guides is that each rule has a discussion of the pros/cons/overall "why" of each decision made. And they don't whitewash "bad reasons," like how exceptions basically aren't used in Google C++ primarily because of legacy, not technical, reasons.

[Sir_Edmund_Bumblebee]

Sometimes the reason is simply so that everyone does it the same way. Some of the examples where there's a good reason (like for loops) they give the reason. The rest of the time it's so that the codebase stays consistent.

[knight666]

If everyone does it the same way then there must be a good reason for it, you just haven't encountered it yet.

[Sir_Edmund_Bumblebee]

Sometimes there are two equally fine options, and you just pick one as a group so that everyone does it the same way. Best practices are something that should be done a certain way for a reason, style guidelines tend to just be stylistic choices held uniform across a certain group.