coding-guidelines.txt

Coding guidelines
=======================

You may have expected a long list here, but there is none.
The essence is to keep the software architecture clean and to
write good, readable code. :-)


Read about anti-patterns in software design/architecture/
development and programming.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Pattern
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AntiPatternsCatalog

Try to avoid those mistakes.


Use tabs for indentation, i.e. at the beginning of lines
(as always, in just about any decent programming language).

Why? It has been discussed a thousand times. Search the web.
A good percentage of the Ruby community seems to prefer two spaces.
We tried to take that into consideration but there's a problem:
2 spaces are too small and make the code look fluttery and
unreadable. Essentially you'd need a Ruby IDE then with code
folding, outlines etc. However we have wasted way too much time
trying to find an IDE. None of them worked acceptably well on Mac
OS X and various Linux distos so we finally gave up. Which means
we decided against spaces. Tabs are _meant_ for indentation. Tabs
are universal. Tabs have better support in most text editors and
IDEs. Tabs are more "accessible". (There should be accessability
guidelines for source code.) Everyone can set their preferred tab
width. You still want a tab to look like 2 spaces? Fine, set your
tab-width to 2. Just don't expand tabs.