12 ms·

The Ruby Style Guide

77 points by garrettdimon 7y ago

h1d 7y ago
Hard to swallow without any reasons written behind each decisions.
- cknoxrun 7y ago
  The Ruby Style Guide has been around for a long time now, this is just a nice update. The guide has received ample feedback and edits/additions over the years, with an emphasis on reaching a consensus amongst senior ruby developers and open source contributors. I believe that adding justifications or reasons for each guideline would make the guide harder to read and search. The way it is written now is succinct enough to pass on to junior developers, and allows a company to centralize style around a well-established set of rules rather than reinventing the wheel.
  - caiocaiocaio 7y ago
    Agreed. I'm just happy to have a style guide that's tasteful enough and well-known among Ruby users. For me, one big advantage of the guide/Rubocop is being able to let other people worry about the little details and variations.
- pmontra 7y ago
  There are some explanations. For example there is a link to a discussion at the end of https://rubystyle.guide/#consistent-multi-line-chains https://rubystyle.guide/#consistent-multi-line-chains
pjungwir 7y ago
Oh fun another style discussion! :-) My own taste is for a "book style": write the code like you see in good books. I agree with most of this guide, although I'm pretty loose and case-by-case in practice. I've gradually added rubocop to lots of my projects, but then I wind up disabling tons of the rules. I'm sad all the Ruby guides I've seen ban "and" and "or". I don't find them to be such an issue, and they are nicer to type & read. For one thing you can say `foo or raise "msg"` but need parens to say `foo || raise("msg")`. On team projects I sigh and go along with it, but it is a shame. Speaking of "book style": I have a bunch of Python books with atrocious style, e.g. no spaces between operators or even between function arguments. How can anyone read that? I even see this from high-quality publishers like O'Reilly. What is going on with the Python world? Are their thumbs tired from all that indentation, so they leave out spaces everywhere else? ;-) I really want to write a SQL style guide. There seems to be almost no consensus. My own formatting is idiosyncratic and not super principled, but I feel it is the most readable and expresses structure the best. It looks like this: SELECT a, b FROM t1 LEFT OUTER JOIN t2 ON t2.t1_id = t1.id WHERE t2.c = 'foo'; (EDIT: Sorry, t2.c = 'foo' is a pretty dumb thing to do in an outer join. :-) Other people like to do one or more of these things: SELECT a , b FROM t1 LEFT OUTER JOIN t2 ON t2.t1_id = t1.id WHERE t2.c = 'foo'; In other words: - lead with the comma in SELECT. - ragged left edge but line up all the single spaces in a column. - indent the joins. Anyway sorry for the rambling. :-) There is some observation that committees spend 90% of their time on trivial details and hardly discuss any of the important stuff, and style is no exception. But who doesn't like giving their opinion? :-)
- danso 7y ago
  Funny, I've been wanting to do/working on a SQL style guide myself, with a big emphasis on using leading commas because of the readability and easy-adjustability. I do something like this: SELECT a, b FROM t1 LEFT OUTER JOIN t2 ON t2.t1_id = t1.id WHERE t2.c = 'foo' ;
  - pjungwir 7y ago
    I don't like it. :-) Splitting each clause into two lines makes my eyes stumble. I can't read it as effortlessly as I read normal text. At least you are left-aligning the keywords though. :-) I have two spaces after my SELECT because when you press tab that's where you wind up next. Keeping things tab-aligned lets you easily type it out without a lot of fuss. I think that gets you much of the benefit of your broken-line clauses without impairing reading flow. Also on a monitor vertical space is scarce, so I'd like to keep that reasonably compressed. I get how leading commas makes it easy to re-order projections but I've never heard anyone say it makes them easier to read. :-) (I have no problem putting them on multiple lines if you have a lot or some are long.) And I'd rather optimize for readability over not needing to add/remove a comma. I can see why you'd indent `ON` although I prefer to keep its conditions at the same level as WHERE. I also do the semicolon at the bottom thing a lot. Anyway it's fun to trade tastes. :-) SQL is surprisingly hard to rule on when it gets complicated. I doubt I am consistent once I start adding subqueries, CASE, etc.
  - Demiurge 7y ago
    This is also my preferred style. This means the keywords are separated from variables, and there is no code-based arbitrary space-alignment.
- sho 7y ago
  > I'm sad all the Ruby guides I've seen ban "and" and "or" Well, as you no doubt know it's about the precedence - "and" and "or" are much lower, which can lead to confusing behaviour since conceptually they overlap so much with && and ||. I confess I had to go and refresh my memory of their exact behaviour, and I've been using ruby for a decade. I guess I agree with the "ban" since reading code can be confusing enough without having to think about which flavour of "and" you're using, but I guess I can see the use case. Your (first) SQL example is exactly the style I would write, by the way! It's funny how conventions seem to arise by some emergent crowd phenomenon. I remember several years ago I realised that hey, I don't even need to capitalise the keywords - but the result looked so "wrong" after years of reading them capitalised that I still do it anyway.
steveklabnik 7y ago
I made a comment on this thread[1] in 2014, and it was closed two days ago. I wondered why... guess this is why! 1: https://github.com/rubocop-hq/ruby-style-guide/issues/273 https://github.com/rubocop-hq/ruby-style-guide/issues/273
- hartator 7y ago
  I don’t fully get your point. There is no official style guideline for Ruby.
  - steveklabnik 7y ago
    I'm not sure what your point is either. Mine was "oh, there's a website now; they must have been reviewing old issues to prepare for the launch." There is no "official" style guide, you're 100% right, but I'm not sure what that has to do with this.
    - hartator 7y ago
      Oh, got you. I thought you were implying some conspiracy to kill conversation or something. Nvm.
      - steveklabnik 7y ago
        Ah, yeah, no worries! I was not :)
        hartator 7y ago
        It's actually an interesting thread. My take would have been to use comma when it's something we intend to modify, no comma when it's not. So intent is explicit. Like: STATES = [ :success, :error ] SUPPORTED_LANGUAGES = [ "en", "es", "fr", ]
- nixpulvis 7y ago
  This thread is interesting to me, since I've changed my mind on this topic since I originally commented. :P I blame Rust, and macros.
danmaz74 7y ago
The only thing I really don't like here is non indenting when inside case. I know that technically it's not a block, but in practice I find it much less readable
- ghostbrainalpha 7y ago
  Everyone agrees with you on readabilty. I think that's why they had to add this bit about this (A bit of History) section... "This is the style established in both "The Ruby Programming Language" and "Programming Ruby". Historically it is derived from the fact that case and switch statements are not blocks, hence should not be indented, and the when and else keywords are labels (compiled in the C language, they are literally labels for JMP calls)."
  - yxhuvud 7y ago
    No, everyone does most assuredly not agree on readability when it comes to case statements. Flat case reads better, and indenting it would be like indenting "elsif" and "else" in an else statement.
    - slx26 7y ago
      yeah, even more, taking the example from the style guide, if lines are short enough, I love doing: case when song.name == 'Misty' ; puts 'Not again!' when song.duration > 120 ; puts 'Too long!' when Time.now.hour > 21 ; puts "It's too late" else song.play end even more, for simple if/elses, many times I do: if member.coding_style.vertical_align? then friends << member else member.show_example(code) end
pswenson 7y ago
80 char line length in 2019?
- pmontra 7y ago
  Python's PEP8 recommends 79 characters.
  - pswenson 7y ago
    slightly worse :)
- davnicwil 7y ago
  I know, on the surface it seems silly, but there are a couple of reasons I've found 80 chars makes things easier in real world workflows in 2019: * Split panes in editors. With 80 chars, you can usually have two panes on screen along with a file tree, on most laptop screens. This is pretty nice to have. * Code reviews in a web interface like Github/Gitlab - 80 chars means usually there's no need to pan, even when your browser window isn't full screen
  - h1d 7y ago
    Enforcing 80 chars on everyone for those reasons doesn't feel justifying. It will definitely make people use weird variable names instead of meaningful ones. is_included = true could turn into, inc = true #included or increment? That's a far worse side effect than other points raised in this thread.
    - ericb 7y ago
      Even worse, abbreviations are terrible as there is one way to write a word correctly, and lots of ways to abbreviate it, so now you have to keep track of that too. Was it inc? incl? incld? includ? in? incldd? Now you have to break flow to go check. There's many ways it could be written and a chance for bugs to be introduced if you accidentally pick the wrong style. And when you read it, does the inc mean incorporated? included? includes? including? incapable? incestual?
tigrezno 7y ago
Spaces for identation? seriously?
- cknoxrun 7y ago
  I do believe most style guidelines for other programming languages prefer spaces over tabs - I believe spaces have "won" (the merit of each is a whole other debate).
weeksie 7y ago
Parens for method calls should only be used when things get ambiguous. Nothing bugs me more than seeing ruby code cluttered up with that garbage. I know, I know, but that's my personal bikeshed and I'll happily die on the roof of it.
onnnon 7y ago
There's also StandardRB, it's like StandardJS but for ruby: https://github.com/testdouble/standard https://github.com/testdouble/standard Lightning talk about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLyV5hOqGQ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLyV5hOqGQ8 Edit: I posted it on its own if you want to discuss: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20186231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20186231
abakus 7y ago
How about 1 space indentation? Just to be able to squeeze even more stuff into the 80 char limit? 0 space is a bit too extreme :)
intsunny 7y ago
I'll never understand Ruby's obsession with implicit return. When reading code, my eye will immediately notice the `return` keyword and will have less to think about in terms of code execution. The `return` keyword makes for great readability.
- matthewmacleod 7y ago
  I much prefer this, though I accept its not without problems in some cases. I find that say Javascript in comparison has a lot of syntactic noise; it's all annoyingly boiler-plate. Maybe JS's implicit-return-in-arrow-functions is a better compromise.
  - h1d 7y ago
    I feel JS has few syntactic noises but which part are you referring to?
hderms 7y ago
All languages should have gofmt at this point. Debating code style is a waste of everyone's time.

77 points by garrettdimon 7y ago

h1d 7y ago

Hard to swallow without any reasons written behind each decisions.

cknoxrun 7y ago
The Ruby Style Guide has been around for a long time now, this is just a nice update. The guide has received ample feedback and edits/additions over the years, with an emphasis on reaching a consensus amongst senior ruby developers and open source contributors. I believe that adding justifications or reasons for each guideline would make the guide harder to read and search. The way it is written now is succinct enough to pass on to junior developers, and allows a company to centralize style around a well-established set of rules rather than reinventing the wheel.
- caiocaiocaio 7y ago
  Agreed. I'm just happy to have a style guide that's tasteful enough and well-known among Ruby users. For me, one big advantage of the guide/Rubocop is being able to let other people worry about the little details and variations.
pmontra 7y ago
There are some explanations. For example there is a link to a discussion at the end of https://rubystyle.guide/#consistent-multi-line-chains https://rubystyle.guide/#consistent-multi-line-chains

pjungwir 7y ago

Oh fun another style discussion! :-) My own taste is for a "book style": write the code like you see in good books. I agree with most of this guide, although I'm pretty loose and case-by-case in practice. I've gradually added rubocop to lots of my projects, but then I wind up disabling tons of the rules. I'm sad all the Ruby guides I've seen ban "and" and "or". I don't find them to be such an issue, and they are nicer to type & read. For one thing you can say `foo or raise "msg"` but need parens to say `foo || raise("msg")`. On team projects I sigh and go along with it, but it is a shame. Speaking of "book style": I have a bunch of Python books with atrocious style, e.g. no spaces between operators or even between function arguments. How can anyone read that? I even see this from high-quality publishers like O'Reilly. What is going on with the Python world? Are their thumbs tired from all that indentation, so they leave out spaces everywhere else? ;-) I really want to write a SQL style guide. There seems to be almost no consensus. My own formatting is idiosyncratic and not super principled, but I feel it is the most readable and expresses structure the best. It looks like this: SELECT a, b FROM t1 LEFT OUTER JOIN t2 ON t2.t1_id = t1.id WHERE t2.c = 'foo'; (EDIT: Sorry, t2.c = 'foo' is a pretty dumb thing to do in an outer join. :-) Other people like to do one or more of these things: SELECT a , b FROM t1 LEFT OUTER JOIN t2 ON t2.t1_id = t1.id WHERE t2.c = 'foo'; In other words: - lead with the comma in SELECT. - ragged left edge but line up all the single spaces in a column. - indent the joins. Anyway sorry for the rambling. :-) There is some observation that committees spend 90% of their time on trivial details and hardly discuss any of the important stuff, and style is no exception. But who doesn't like giving their opinion? :-)

danso 7y ago
Funny, I've been wanting to do/working on a SQL style guide myself, with a big emphasis on using leading commas because of the readability and easy-adjustability. I do something like this: SELECT a, b FROM t1 LEFT OUTER JOIN t2 ON t2.t1_id = t1.id WHERE t2.c = 'foo' ;
- pjungwir 7y ago
  I don't like it. :-) Splitting each clause into two lines makes my eyes stumble. I can't read it as effortlessly as I read normal text. At least you are left-aligning the keywords though. :-) I have two spaces after my SELECT because when you press tab that's where you wind up next. Keeping things tab-aligned lets you easily type it out without a lot of fuss. I think that gets you much of the benefit of your broken-line clauses without impairing reading flow. Also on a monitor vertical space is scarce, so I'd like to keep that reasonably compressed. I get how leading commas makes it easy to re-order projections but I've never heard anyone say it makes them easier to read. :-) (I have no problem putting them on multiple lines if you have a lot or some are long.) And I'd rather optimize for readability over not needing to add/remove a comma. I can see why you'd indent `ON` although I prefer to keep its conditions at the same level as WHERE. I also do the semicolon at the bottom thing a lot. Anyway it's fun to trade tastes. :-) SQL is surprisingly hard to rule on when it gets complicated. I doubt I am consistent once I start adding subqueries, CASE, etc.
- Demiurge 7y ago
  This is also my preferred style. This means the keywords are separated from variables, and there is no code-based arbitrary space-alignment.
sho 7y ago
> I'm sad all the Ruby guides I've seen ban "and" and "or" Well, as you no doubt know it's about the precedence - "and" and "or" are much lower, which can lead to confusing behaviour since conceptually they overlap so much with && and ||. I confess I had to go and refresh my memory of their exact behaviour, and I've been using ruby for a decade. I guess I agree with the "ban" since reading code can be confusing enough without having to think about which flavour of "and" you're using, but I guess I can see the use case. Your (first) SQL example is exactly the style I would write, by the way! It's funny how conventions seem to arise by some emergent crowd phenomenon. I remember several years ago I realised that hey, I don't even need to capitalise the keywords - but the result looked so "wrong" after years of reading them capitalised that I still do it anyway.

steveklabnik 7y ago

I made a comment on this thread[1] in 2014, and it was closed two days ago. I wondered why... guess this is why! 1: https://github.com/rubocop-hq/ruby-style-guide/issues/273 https://github.com/rubocop-hq/ruby-style-guide/issues/273

hartator 7y ago
I don’t fully get your point. There is no official style guideline for Ruby.
- steveklabnik 7y ago
  I'm not sure what your point is either. Mine was "oh, there's a website now; they must have been reviewing old issues to prepare for the launch." There is no "official" style guide, you're 100% right, but I'm not sure what that has to do with this.
  - hartator 7y ago
    Oh, got you. I thought you were implying some conspiracy to kill conversation or something. Nvm.
    - steveklabnik 7y ago
      Ah, yeah, no worries! I was not :)
      - hartator 7y ago
        It's actually an interesting thread. My take would have been to use comma when it's something we intend to modify, no comma when it's not. So intent is explicit. Like: STATES = [ :success, :error ] SUPPORTED_LANGUAGES = [ "en", "es", "fr", ]
nixpulvis 7y ago
This thread is interesting to me, since I've changed my mind on this topic since I originally commented. :P I blame Rust, and macros.

danmaz74 7y ago

The only thing I really don't like here is non indenting when inside case. I know that technically it's not a block, but in practice I find it much less readable

ghostbrainalpha 7y ago
Everyone agrees with you on readabilty. I think that's why they had to add this bit about this (A bit of History) section... "This is the style established in both "The Ruby Programming Language" and "Programming Ruby". Historically it is derived from the fact that case and switch statements are not blocks, hence should not be indented, and the when and else keywords are labels (compiled in the C language, they are literally labels for JMP calls)."
- yxhuvud 7y ago
  No, everyone does most assuredly not agree on readability when it comes to case statements. Flat case reads better, and indenting it would be like indenting "elsif" and "else" in an else statement.
  - slx26 7y ago
    yeah, even more, taking the example from the style guide, if lines are short enough, I love doing: case when song.name == 'Misty' ; puts 'Not again!' when song.duration > 120 ; puts 'Too long!' when Time.now.hour > 21 ; puts "It's too late" else song.play end even more, for simple if/elses, many times I do: if member.coding_style.vertical_align? then friends << member else member.show_example(code) end

pswenson 7y ago

80 char line length in 2019?

pmontra 7y ago
Python's PEP8 recommends 79 characters.
- pswenson 7y ago
  slightly worse :)
davnicwil 7y ago
I know, on the surface it seems silly, but there are a couple of reasons I've found 80 chars makes things easier in real world workflows in 2019: * Split panes in editors. With 80 chars, you can usually have two panes on screen along with a file tree, on most laptop screens. This is pretty nice to have. * Code reviews in a web interface like Github/Gitlab - 80 chars means usually there's no need to pan, even when your browser window isn't full screen
- h1d 7y ago
  Enforcing 80 chars on everyone for those reasons doesn't feel justifying. It will definitely make people use weird variable names instead of meaningful ones. is_included = true could turn into, inc = true #included or increment? That's a far worse side effect than other points raised in this thread.
  - ericb 7y ago
    Even worse, abbreviations are terrible as there is one way to write a word correctly, and lots of ways to abbreviate it, so now you have to keep track of that too. Was it inc? incl? incld? includ? in? incldd? Now you have to break flow to go check. There's many ways it could be written and a chance for bugs to be introduced if you accidentally pick the wrong style. And when you read it, does the inc mean incorporated? included? includes? including? incapable? incestual?

tigrezno 7y ago

Spaces for identation? seriously?

cknoxrun 7y ago
I do believe most style guidelines for other programming languages prefer spaces over tabs - I believe spaces have "won" (the merit of each is a whole other debate).

weeksie 7y ago

Parens for method calls should only be used when things get ambiguous. Nothing bugs me more than seeing ruby code cluttered up with that garbage. I know, I know, but that's my personal bikeshed and I'll happily die on the roof of it.

onnnon 7y ago

There's also StandardRB, it's like StandardJS but for ruby: https://github.com/testdouble/standard https://github.com/testdouble/standard Lightning talk about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLyV5hOqGQ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLyV5hOqGQ8 Edit: I posted it on its own if you want to discuss: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20186231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20186231

abakus 7y ago

How about 1 space indentation? Just to be able to squeeze even more stuff into the 80 char limit? 0 space is a bit too extreme :)

intsunny 7y ago

I'll never understand Ruby's obsession with implicit return. When reading code, my eye will immediately notice the `return` keyword and will have less to think about in terms of code execution. The `return` keyword makes for great readability.

matthewmacleod 7y ago
I much prefer this, though I accept its not without problems in some cases. I find that say Javascript in comparison has a lot of syntactic noise; it's all annoyingly boiler-plate. Maybe JS's implicit-return-in-arrow-functions is a better compromise.
- h1d 7y ago
  I feel JS has few syntactic noises but which part are you referring to?

hderms 7y ago

All languages should have gofmt at this point. Debating code style is a waste of everyone's time.