Style guides
You should read this guide alongside the programming language recommendations.
Code style guides
Developers read code much more often than they write it. These guidelines are intended to improve the readability of code and make it consistent across GDS projects.
A style guide is about consistency. Consistency with this style guide is important. Consistency within a project is more important. Consistency within one module or function is most important.
But most importantly: know when it’s ok to be inconsistent. Sometimes the style guide just does not apply. When in doubt, use your best judgement. Look at other examples and decide what looks best. And do not hesitate to ask if you’re unsure.
Some good reasons to ignore a particular guideline include:
- when applying the guideline would make the code less readable, even for someone who is used to reading code that follows this style guide
- to be consistent with surrounding code that also breaks it (maybe for historic reasons) – although this is also an opportunity to clean up the existing code
- when the code in question is older than the introduction of the guideline and there is no reason to modify that code
- when the code needs to remain compatible with older versions that do not support the feature recommended by the style guide
We’ve got a consistent style for:
Some of the guidelines in the style guides are codified in a .editorconfig file. Place a copy of this file in your project’s repository to have tooling that supports EditorConfig automatically meet the guidelines.