document updated 12 years ago, on Oct 10, 2012

This page points out good parts of style guides across different languages.

Python's influence

Discovering Python was something of a revelation for me. Before Python, I had done a lot of Perl programming, and the difference between the two is night-and-day:

"this code only took me about ninety minutes to write—and it worked correctly the first time I ran it. To say I was astonished would have been positively wallowing in understatement. ... The long-term usefulness of a language comes not in its ability to support clever hacks, but from how well and how unobtrusively it supports the day-to-day work of programming. The day-to-day work of programming consists not of writing new programs, but mostly reading and modifying existing ones."

"The 'Perl datastructures cookbook' is awesome. You know what's more awesome? Not needing one. In Python data structures make sense so you don't need a secret decoder ring to use them." -a Google employee

To me, Python's success indicates that we need to focus on readability much more than we had before.

Procedural programming

Python's PEP 8

Functional programming

Functional languages require you to pay more attention to line-breaks and indenting than you do in procedural languages.

style guides on line-breaks and indenting
- Scheme: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]