Rails Development No-Nos

http://www.chadfowler.com/2009/4/1/20-rails-development-no-no-s

by helium • 17 years ago

9 15 17 years ago

chadfowler.com

teej• 17 years ago

> Tabs instead of spaces

Every editor on earth supports both. Why the hell do I have to use spaces if the choice has -no effect whatsoever-.

old-gregg2• 17 years ago

You may be wondering why you're getting downmodded. That's because people disagree with you. I suspect the good reason is that different editors handle tabs differently. Some treat them as 2 spaces, some 4, some 8. I don't use tabs and frankly I don't even know what my tab width is set to in vim.

Using tabs in the code shared between multiple people will produce annoying inconsistencies. Spaces will look identical everywhere.

kscaldef2• 17 years ago

Well, I think the main argument for tabs is that they will look exactly how each individual wants them to look. If you like things compressed horizontally, set your tab width to 2. If you want things really spacious, set it to 8. Spaces don't give individuals the option to tailor for their preferences.

There are two non-trivial issues in this debate though:

1) mixing spaces and tabs is undeniable evil. Everyone on your team needs to conform to one or the other. (And since I like spaces, everyone should use spaces ;-). )

2) In a layout-based syntax like Haskell's, you cannot set your tab width willy-nilly. The syntax defines a tab as equivalent to 8 spaces. Vary this in your editor at your peril.

old-gregg2• 17 years ago

indents per line of more than 2 spaces. drives me baddy

I hate 2-space indentation. It's weird. It makes the code look less readable and every other more or less popular programming language uses 4. I see no reason why Ruby code needs to look like a narrow, dense spaghetti because of this stupid "rule".

There is nothing in the language that justifies this awkward feature: Ruby isn't excessively nested and an average line length is short.

This language looks beautiful when properly indented with 4 spaces. I've heard from a couple of Pythonista friends that Ruby looked to much Perl-like to them, I suspect some of it can be attributed to this tradition of fucked up indentation.

Before reading open source Ruby code I always reformat it properly: just a hotkey in vim.

jeroen• 17 years ago

The whole 2/4/8 spaces argument should be a reason to go for tabs. Then everyone could set their own tab size and have their code indented as they want.

Unfortunately, I don't think all editors play nice.

bkudria3• 17 years ago

Amen. And, don't inflict pain on others just because your editor sucks.

ruby_roo• 17 years ago

It was weird for me at first, but I find it comfortable now. The eyes don't have to move as much while scanning code; small thing, I guess.

Of course, if I didn't have a proper text editor that took care of the tab stops for me, it'd probably make me crazy to have to hit the space bar twice for indents.

Still, it was never as off-putting as the significant whitespace in Python, which any pythonista can tell you becomes very easy to live with after an easy and brief acclimation period.

erlanger• 17 years ago

Almost all of these "No-No's" apply equally to development on any platform. Adding "Rails" sorta makes it link-bait, since there's very little domain-specific knowledge here:

  * Write tests
  * Don't write obfuscated code
  * Consistent indentation, using spaces
  * Don't mix presentation with logic

etc. etc.

ConceptDog• 17 years ago

Holy crap.. Articles that are almost entirely links to twitter need to burn in hell.

bkudria3• 17 years ago

OK, I'll bite. What's wrong with Twitter?

windsurfer• 17 years ago

I know I probably shouldn't do this (for fear of getting down-voted), but... the basic problem with twitter is it's severe restriction on n

umjames• 17 years ago

I don't think I agree with no comments in methods and not much comments overall.

What if the comments specify why you're taking a certain approach over another or something that was decided by other people? Comments are good for documenting not what the code says, but the reasoning behind that code. This is especially helpful if you haven't looked at it for awhile.

Rails Development No-Nos

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