Coding Style Preferences

I recently did a little poll on twitter and in my office to get a feel for what people's coding style preferences were.  The fun thing about coding style preferences is that they are completely irrelevant, and yet a topic that people can easily get pretty passionate about.

It was only a little poll, with 35 people responding to these few questions:

Curly braces?

• On new line
• On same line

Spaces in control statements (if, foreach, etc)?

• Spaces outside and in ex: if ( this.HadSomeCandy )
• Spaces inside only ex: if( this.HadSomeCandy )
• Spaces outside only ex: if (this.HadSomeCandy)
• No spaces ex: if(this.HadSomeCandy)

Spaces in method calls?

• Spaces outside and in ex: someone.ShouldJustDecide ( "what", "is", "right );
• Spaces inside only ex: someone.ShouldJustDecide( "what", "is", "right" );
• Spaces outside only ex: someone.ShouldJustDecide ("what", "is", "right");
• No spaces ex: someone.ShouldJustDecide("what", "is", "right");

Spaces in method declaration?

• Spaces outside and in
• Spaces inside only
• Spaces outside only
• No spaces

Spaces in method calls with no args?

• No space ex: someone.ShouldJustDecide();
• Space ex: someone.ShouldJustDecide( );

How many spaces in indentation?

• 2
• 4
• 8

And here are the results:

So, clearly, the winner is spaces outside/no spaces as in:

if (who.Cares("about coding style?!");

An interesting observation here is that the people who "don't like spaces" are very consistent in their preferences whereas the people who "do like spaces" are much more varied.  This is evident in that of the 22 people who voted for spaces outside only in control statements, 19 also voted for no spaces in method calls.

Note that only 25 people answered the question about spaces in indentation because I added it to the poll later.  I expect the results would have been much different because it was the people from my office who didn't get to answer and our internal standard is 2 spaces.

For curly braces it was 22 to 13 in favor of braces on a new line.

There were answers for just about every combination, no matter how weird.  For example, some people put spaces outside and in for control statements but no spaces in method calls.

The sample size of this poll is too small to actually mean anything, but it is still interesting that the preferences line up pretty closely with Microsoft's coding style standards.  I didn't verify this, but I wonder if this could be influenced by Visual Studio's default code style settings.

Personally I was very much in the minority here.  For the last five years I've been a spaces outside and in/spaces inside guy as in:

if ( who.Cares( "about coding styles?!" );

I've also been a 2 spaces guy and if you go back to college I was a curly braces on the same line proponent.  I started doing the curly braces on a new line when I started full time at my job.  I recently tried curly braces on the same line when I started learning jQuery and I have to admit, I didn't like it anymore.  Could be just because my javascript is still pretty ugly though.

I'm also starting to second guess the whole 2 spaces thing.  I always preferred it because it made it so you could see more code.  But now that I've embraced the SOLID principles, if the lines of code in my methods were so indented as to cause a problem reading them, I'd suspect a "design" problem with that method.  And I'm starting to think that 4 spaces would make a pretty big readability difference, since it would be much easier to spot where indentations start and end.  I think its especially important if you do curly braces on the end of the line, or if you're writing Python or Haml.

Finally, I always liked the spaces in control flow because I believed it made it easier to read.  But when I was preparing this poll I wrote the different styles out side by side and I started to wonder if the spaces actually bring out the "noise" of the different characters...  I'm still not sure about this one.

This whole exercise also made we question WHY there is so much possible variation in the languages.  Wouldn't it be nice of the details of the language were done in such a way that there was 1 right way to do it and we didn't have to concern ourselves with silly details like where to put spaces?