Coding Conventions (Rules)

Every programming language, development environment, business, and person has their own opinion of how to write readable code. Without a set of rules, reading your colleague's code would be difficult. It is important to make code easy to read because someone else might need to use or improve it - and that's ok!

Most programmers have very specific rules for code style. Ours are simple:

• Variable and Function names will be meaningful and complete.

• Variable and Function names will only start with lowercase letters.

• Variables and Functions will be named using camelCase.

• Constants are written in all UPPERCASE letters.

• You will put spaces after commas, and around operators ( + - * / ).

• Always use 2 or 4 spaces to indent code blocks (our default is 2) (tabs are interpreted differently, depending on the text editor). Example: function toCelsius(fahrenheit) { return (5 / 9) * (fahrenheit - 32); }

• Always end single lines of code with a semicolon;

• Place opening brackets at the end of the current line, preceded by a single space.

  • Closing brackets are placed on their own line without leading spaces. for (i = 0; i < 5; i++) { // Opening bracket x += i; } // Closing bracket

• Hyphens are not permitted in names, use underscore instead.

For more on this topic:

JavaScript Style Guide

Programming styleWikipedia