For me it’s more important to agree on idiom than it is to agree on where to put the braces and whether to use tabs or spaces for indentation, although I do prefer consistency here too.

Braces and tabs are easily handled by tools and assuming the team can agree something, it helps to pick a standard for these things.

Much more interesting however, is how the individuals on the team choose to express themselves in a language. To use a Perl example, one man’s:

my %hash = map { getkey($_) -> $_ } @array;

is another’s

my %hash = ();
foreach (@array) {
$hash{getkey($_) = $_;
}

These sorts of differences in personal style really can impact on the understandability of the code. IMHO, XP’s idea of coding style implicitly includes choice of idiom. After all, the XP ideal is that it should not be possible to tell one person’s code from another’s on the same XP team.

I am not aware of any usable checkstyle/lint tools for Ruby. CheckR is at the planning stage and looks promising. If you ever hear of one, I am interested too!

Regarding templates, I recommend checking out Sun’s code conventions for Java, and the GNU coding standards. Whether you like them or not, they are a good source of inspiration. Googling “coding standard” will give you plenty of examples. By the way, if I remember correctly — since I cannot find it — the code conventions in Rails are along the lines of “look at the existing code and try to integrate your code seemlessly”.

Know any good checkstyle/lint tools for Ruby?
Know any good links for aspiring Coding Guidelines authors? Heck, any templates I can pillage? :P

Do you know of other good articles for introducing people to good development techniques?

Thanks,
Quag.