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rubocop
ruby-style-guide
Learning & Reference2011–2021
rubocop / ruby-style-guide

ruby-style-guide

A community-driven Ruby coding style guide

Learning & Reference
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
24Distinct people
25Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
16.5KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A community-driven Ruby coding style guide

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 12:54:37 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year25 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2011-09-12 14:53:36 UTC to 2021-11-11 11:09:28 UTC.

0123452011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 2 submissions, 0 comments20112012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 2 submissions, 3 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20162017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2021

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20112011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC220
20122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC523
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303

What Hacker News says

25 sources
kenhwang·May 15, 2020
Seems like you're comparing between languages that end up being the default choice due to their low learning curve (Python/Go/Java) and languages chosen because the default choice wasn't good enough (Ruby/Rust/Scala). The latter tends to be much less restrictive or more featureful which necessitates governance by convention/culture/guidelines since its significantly more difficult to be exactly prescriptive over significantly more variance. For example, most Ruby found in the wild follows some variation found in the style guide: https://github.com/rubocop-hq/ruby-style-guide (same with Scala: https://docs.scala-lang.org/style/ and Rust: https://github.com/rust-dev-tools/fmt-rfcs/blob/master/guide...) and their communities generally care enough to try to enforce it. Most languages have an universally agreeable style guide these days. I per
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sonally find the first set of languages to be more consistent syntactically (typically because they're simpler languages that have auto-formaters) but the latter set of languages are extremely consistent in patterns/ideologies. It seems like you care more about the former and didn't care to learn about the latter (which I'll admit, does present a higher learning curve and tends to be acquired through experience with the community than through a doc).
In How to Fix Slow Code in Ruby
22c·Feb 18, 2020
Not every rule has a reason, some of it is just "because style guide" and if you try to look up the rationale there, you'll find none. Classic example is Perl style %w(literal arrays) vs ['traditional', 'arrays']. > Prefer `%w` to the literal array syntax when you need an array of strings Which was introduced[1] into the style guide nearly 9 years ago with practically no reasoning. Prefer `%w` because why exactly? [1] https://github.com/rubocop-hq/ruby-style-guide/commit/b27eff...
In RuboCop 0.80: Ruby static code analyzer and code formatter
hirundo·Oct 4, 2019
I think Robert's Rules should be treated like our dev team treats Batsov's Ruby Style guide (1): Use them as a starting point but forked and modified as appropriate for our use case. And then maybe another teams likes ours better, and uses it as a starting point and forks it to make changes. Recurse as needed. Too bad it wasn't published initially on github in 1876. What were they thinking. (1) https://github.com/rubocop-hq/ruby-style-guide
In Rethinking Robert's Rules of Order
matthewmacleod·Aug 20, 2015
I guess it's generally just that it's regarded as fairly idiomatic Ruby. bbatsov's popular style guide, for example (https://github.com/bbatsov/ruby-style-guide#if-as-a-modifier): The same applies to while/until loops, which can lead to quite succinct code. I've been using it for a long time, so I don't find it confusing at all – but I agree it's pretty rare to find, so I'm not surprised to find out some people would rather not see that!
In Imba – A new programming language for the web
nchelluri·Jul 8, 2015
EDIT: I realize I left out my main point: I definitely agree with several of the points in the article. I have long wished for some way to traverse ObjectSpace easily and to know what code is being actually executed at any point in time. Lack of use of or availablity of comprehensive static analysis tools in our programming today is a huge problem, IMO. </end edit> I don't have much experience with Ruby debuggers, as I rarely use them. I do use RubyMine, every day. It's got powerful inspections and is an incredibly valuable tool for me. But, I originally used IDEA many years ago, and I don't think that RubyMine is anywhere near as powerful, because of all the dynamism inherent in Ruby. I personally think that Ruby is far too flexible a language. I use metaprogramming, monkey patching, and `method_missing` exceedingly sparingly, if at all.
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I try to never make code any less traceable than possible. But, I use Rails, and while I don't dive into the Rails source very often, I'm sure there's a lot of hidden stuff in there. All sorts of methods added to classes (ActiveSupport - inflections, time zone helpers, ... - and all the core extensions that have made their ways into gems that do not even require ActiveSupport), and all of my URL helpers which use method_missing to "define methods" that never existed. In a word, Ruby's dangerous (and can be made to be very hard to reason about). I have been watching http://crystal-lang.org/ every once in a while. I think one of the core strengths of Ruby is how concise and elegant it is or at least can be, and how readable it is or at least can be. It's pretty damn nice in a lot of ways. The community support is of course incredible as well (https://github.com/bbatsov/ruby-style-guide is great, http://slim-lang.com/ has made markup a non-arduous task, etc). Maybe we can do better. EDIT: Incidentally: a lot of my complaints about Ruby are things that I would say about JS as well, but I have considerably less experience there. I just know that I've half-learned sooo many JS patterns. While I don't know Python, one of the things I've really liked hearing about it is how there's supposed to be "one right way" to do stuff. I think this is good. Code serves a purpose, it's a functional tool - IMO, it's not like written language where you really need a bunch of similar-but-different ways to get the same meaning across.
In Ruby Is Defined by Terrible Tools

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