Idiomatic JavaScript Style Guide

Principles of Writing Consistent, Idiomatic JavaScript

This is a living document and new ideas for improving the code around us are always welcome. Contribute: fork, clone, branch, commit, push, pull request.

All code in any code-base should look like a single person typed it, no matter how many people contributed.

The following list outlines the practices that I use in all code that I am the original author of; contributions to projects that I have created should follow these guidelines.

I do not intend to impose my style preferences on other people's code or projects; if an existing common style exists, it should be respected.

"Arguments over style are pointless. There should be a style guide, and you should follow it"

Rebecca Murphey

 

"Part of being a good steward to a successful project is realizing that writing code for yourself is a Bad Idea™. If thousands of people are using your code, then write your code for maximum clarity, not your personal preference of how to get clever within the spec."

Idan Gazit

Table of Contents:

• Translations
• Tools
• Preface
• Whitespace
• Syntax
• Type Checking (Courtesy jQuery Core Style Guidelines)
• Conditional Evaluation
• Practical Style
• Naming
• Misc
• Native & Host Objects
• Comments
• One Language Code

Appendix

Comma First.

This section needs revisiting for our uses.

Any project that cites this document as its base style guide will not accept comma first code formatting, unless explicitly specified otherwise by that project's author.

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Principles of Writing Consistent, Idiomatic JavaScript by Rick Waldron and Contributors is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at github.com/rwldrn/idiomatic.js.