Enforceable Style-Guidlines for Contributions

[guygastineau]

Currently we have a loose reference to an external style-guide that is not enforced.

It should be clear that this is not meant to be a style enforced on our students by mentors.

I propose that we create a clear, enforceable, in-house style-guide that is applied/enforced on all contributions. This project may be started as a PR, but it is also fine for us to flesh out some ideas/preferences here before that gets underway.

The completion of this project will also necessitate changes to our docs on contributing.

[guygastineau]

I would like to address the following question rather immediately:

Shouldn't we change our file and directory naming schema to kebab-case instead of snake_case?

Personally I see no reason to convert our slugs between these two conventions. Furthermore, who really likes underscores?!?

Well, that is probably a bit too emotional. I wont make this change unless there is majority support, but for the record I think it would an excellent improvement.

[kotp]

I believe the snake case is something that effects things at a higher level than just the track. (from memory, not recently researched).

[guygastineau]

You are probably right.

That aspect should be put on hold until we can get verification.

[kotp]

I can check this later, just need to browse around to a few different tracks and verify, or look for snake_case in the issues for exercism/exercism maybe.

[guygastineau]

@kotp thank you ❤️

[kotp]

For the ones I checked, the languages that prefer not using camelCase style file names use dash for the exercise name (folder) and underscore for multi-word names.

So currently, leaving the standard as shish-kebab/snake_case as it is now is probably the thing to do. We may have some choice as to the file name themselves, but I don't believe we have freedom for the exercise directory name style at the "track" level.

[guygastineau]

You are right. All of the exercise directories expected to be kebab-case. The thing that gets me about snake_casing the filenames is that I can't see the reason behind it.

It is harder to type, and it forces all of our scripts to convert between the kebab exercise slug at the directory level and the snake interpretation of that same slug.

If other tracks are using camelCase for their exercises, then this might mean we are not forced to follow the convention.

[kotp]

Some other languages are using this camelCase, because their language has adopted this. Also, another consideration is that _ is not used to indicate an option while - is. In a line of commands, this can sometimes be hard to see, especially if it is at the end of a terminal screen, and unsure if there is a space there that you can't detect. (This is the human aspect, a program would be able to detect it).

I prefer the underscores, and not sure what you mean by harder to type. It is in exactly the same position as the - (except for the one on the numeric keypad) on qwerty keyboards. At least as easy to type as any other shifted and unshifted character pairs.

[guygastineau]

You make a good point about accessibility.

I just hate simultaneous key presses 😈

I am also annoyed every time I have to transform it to a slug or transform from a slug to the snake_case version, but I can live with it. I think it provides more opportunities for error in it's current state than it would in kebab-case though 😝

[kotp]

Make a library that we can load to do that in a function... ?