Ruby Style Guide

This Styleguide will be a reference for how to format the Ruby Code contributed to this project. This is important, so the entire code looks like "all of a piece". There will soon be some changes here (Ruby 1.9 Hash Syntax f.e.) plus changes to the code, so it matches those guidelines.

Based upon Christian Neukirchen's Styleguide

Formatting

• Encoding: UTF8 with Unix-style line endings
• Use 2 space indent, no tabs
• Use spaces around operators, after commas, colons and semicolons, around { and before }
• No spaces after (, [ and before ], )
• No spaces before and after default parameters: def method(a=1, b='sth')
• Favor newline over ;
• Use empty lines to break up a long method into logical paragraphs
• Keep lines fewer than 80 characters
• Avoid trailing whitespace
• On top of a file, do:
  1. (optional) Shebang (#!/usr/bin/env ruby)
  2. File-header (we need specific documentation for this)
  3. Module imports, each in alphabetical order:
     1. Standard-modules, i.e. 'net'
     2. Newline
     3. Third party modules/files, i.e. 'rspec'
     4. Newline
     5. Files and modules from the current project.
• Use require instead of include unless you really need the include-behaviour.

Syntax

• Use def with parentheses when there are arguments, use no parenthesis if there are no arguments
• Never use for loops, unless you exactly know why (and I can't think of any case)
• Use &&/|| for boolean expressions, and/or for control flow
• Avoid ?:, use if and unless
• Use {...} block syntax for one-liner, do...end for Multines
• Avoid return where not required
• If you have to fear void or nil, use ||= for a default value
• Never use a logical operator in an unless statement - use if instead
• For class method definitions use Classname.method_name in favor of self.method_name
• Instead of the class << self syntax, define multiple methods as indicated above.

Naming

• Use lowercase snake_case for variables and methods
• Use CamelCase for classes and modules
• Use SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE for constants
• Variables, Getters and Setters should be nouns, methods should be verbs (not single letters)
• Use plural for collections, except for hashes. numbers = [], but person = {}
• Methods that return boolean values have a ? at the end
• Methods that change the object have a ! at the end