For the record, I do single-tab indent and display them with a width of four characters. Everyone wins.

Maybe even
return if x.nil?

Most Ruby users that I know care deeply about the “look and feel” of the language they use – that’s the whole reason they love Ruby so much. Efforts to come up with the “best practise” for writing clear, understandable, good looking code are not elitism or an effort to become “cool kids”. It’s more an effort to arrive at some kind of ideal standard form, by people who care deeply about style and function.

And more than 2 spaces is ridiculous. Maybe 4 spaces is necessary for Java, a much more verbose language, else the indentation gets lost in a sea of code .. but Ruby is far more concise. 2 spaces is fine in well written code.

Also, I disagree that Ruby is becoming less friendly. There’s a few new corporate wannabe wankers around, sure, but you get that anywhere. The ruby people I know are friendly as anything. Calm down, cheer up and have a little more faith in people.

I like Ruby, but I don’t care for a lot of the style and idioms that are completely counter to most other languages and practices just so the people using them can be the “kewl kids.” Worse is the flogging certain community folks give when their arbitrary favorite style isn’t followed. It feels a lot like royal manners–designed to make a small group feel elite because they follow some arbitrary rules. It’s just style snobbery and doesn’t fit within the usually friendly atmosphere of teh Ruby community (slowly being eroded as elitism spreads).

Here are some thoughts on good Ruby & Rails style — I’m mostly focusing on Ruby-specific guidelines here. This is somewhat closer to a brain dump than a fully-baked style guide, so it’s something I intend to come back to, especially after hearing ev…

nice argument!

In terms of ternary operator, the author provides no legitimate reason not to use it. The justification is “I don’t like it”. This is ridiculous. The ‘? : ‘ operator is quite definitely a “Ruby idiom”, and is significantly more readable then the overly-verbose single-line example given.

all_users.select(&:is_active).map(&:name).sort

‘is_active’ is violating my feelings
Using prefixes like ‘is_’, ‘get_’ and ’set_’ is so java (and yes, java is a synonym for ugly here). In ruby instead of prefixing with ‘is_’ you’d use the postfixed questionmark, e.g.:

all_users.select(&:active?).map(&:name).sort

Regards
apeiros

a_very_long_method_name(
argument1,
a + b,
arg 3
)

looks much better than this

a_very_long_method_name(argument1,
a + b, arg 3)

or this

a_very_long_method_name(argument1,
a + b, arg 3)