On 27.08.2010 14:15, Irakli Gozalishvili wrote:
Hi,
Please don't be too aggressive in replies, I know it's too ambitious &
may not lead to anything, but I still want to give it a try and
suggest to:
Employ some of the decisions that being made with coffee script &
python in order to over all the wars regarding: 2 space vs 4 space vs
tabs, where to put braces, whether or not use optional semicolons. All
the style guidelines, just hurt developers, who have to switch
mentally every time they work on a project with a different style guides.
What exactly are you suggesting to "stop wars"? Though, I think today
there are no such wars in more-less professional JS scripting (usually
is used combination of Java's style guide with some local changes),
majority in general is in agreement of how /current/ JS code should
looks like.
The priority of applying some coding conventions and style guides are:
1. A local style guide used in company (the highest priority; it may
shadow an official style guide of a technology if there is useful
arrangement);
2. The official style guide provided by the main official resource of
the technology (in this case -- http://ecmascript.org; is a
/recommendation/ for a professionally formed code);
3. Local habit (the lowest priority; should be avoided. Used by
beginners as a habit from previous technologies, e.g. underscore_case
from C vs. camelCase used in JS).
And the only way to stop "some" mystic "wars" is to specify point (2),
i.e. the official style guide suggested by the official resource of the
technology. Many technologies have such recommendations, e.g. Python's
"PEP 8" (http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/), Java's official
style guide
(http://developers.sun.com/sunstudio/products/archive/whitepapers/java-style.pdf),
etc. Only having this done and /exactly on the official resource/ may be
a good reference in arguments when choosing a convention style guide.
And since ECMAScript has no such an official style guide, yeah, it would
be good to write one. It is even good from a solid position -- other
mainstream technologies have their recommendations for professionally
written code. Some of them even suggest general structure of file system
folders, e.g. Erlang for building their OTP applications, or Ruby (on
Rails) which uses "convention over configuration" principle for
decreasing a code syntactically and to have general, well-known to
everyone, structure.
Currently, as a variant, the style guide of Mozilla may be treated as an
"official", because JavaScript (and its inventor) are directly related
with Mozilla. So, in arguments for choosing a convention style guide you
may refer to their style guide too
(https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript_style_guide, but this is
mostly for scripting XUL as I see, and there are doubtful underscores,
e.g. "UI_init").
Not bad (based on Java's style guide and, actually, is its complete
"clone"/port) Crockford's description:
http://javascript.crockford.com/code.html -- this one may be used in
official document on http://ecmascript.org (2 or 4 spaces -- is needed
to be decided though).
Besides if I follow correctly it's being agreed to make backwards
incompatible syntax changes in new version of ECMAScript :)
No, only very-very needed incompatible changes (a "migrate tax"?). Here
was a thread when I was confused regarding short notation of "funargs"
(which is #) and why "fun" cannot be used -- I thought that "fun" will
be a new keyword, but no, it's not worth about new keyword.
As a side note, I'd like to also mention that coffee script managed to
reduce verbosity so match, making writing code so much better experience!
Yeah, as I mentioned, the good ways of removing all obsolete
"syntactic/logical noise/garbage" and "bad parts" of previous versions
is either to invent a new language (that is CoffeeScript does regarding
JavaScript), or to plan some version which will be completely
incomparable with previous code (let the Web crash with this new
version!, if this new version will bring new highly-abstracted, modern
and useful things). ES has such version -- it's the ES6 (aka Harmony),
but it approves only very-very needed (and well-founded) changes (e.g.
mentioned above "fun" won't be accepted because will "break the Web" as
many scripts use "fun" as a name of simple "funargs"). Current approach
with "use strict" (used now in ES5) is also a good way of, not so
radical, but gradual removing of obsolete things (`with`, etc).
P.S.: explicit semicolon is also a "syntactic noise". It's just a
consequence of some current well-known JS's ASI pitfalls (and
minimizaton's issues) that an implicit semicolon was named as a bad
practice. In general, it's a "noise" which (if needed) should be done by
the machine, but not the human. If implemented well, ASI -- is a good
idea. So, all that Ruby, Coffee, etc decrease this noise nicely. Though,
I myself (as a habit) use always now explicit semicolon.
Regards!
--
Irakli Gozalishvili
Web: http://www.jeditoolkit.com/
Address: 29 Rue Saint-Georges, 75009 Paris, France
<http://goo.gl/maps/3CHu>
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