Even when you speak the same language as someone else, you may find differences in spelling, pronunciation, or even vocabulary. While the difference between “color” and “colour” isn’t likely to confuse anyone, you might run into trouble if your audience doesn’t realize that a car’s “boot” is the same as its “trunk.” Some of us are still trying to figure out whether we wait “on line,” “in line,” or whether we simply “queue up.”

Computer languages are no different in this regard. When you’re working on a large software project, how you express something may be a vital part of the code. As open source community, we’ve adopted a set of conventions intended to give all contributors a common coding vocabulary. This ensures that it’s as easy as possible to understand code quickly when reading it, both for the original author and later reviewers. Our coding style covers many areas from formatting (we prefer two-space indentation) to use of language and library features (we only allow multiple interface inheritance, not multiple implementation inheritance).

When we release our own code to the public at open source, we’re not just sharing our work with the world, we contributions to that code base from the public. Naturally, our own code follows our style guidelines, but until now, contributors to Open Source projects haven’t had a reference for the Appchin coding style. This has led to frustration for coders and reviewers, and I believe that it’s unfair to ask contributors to use a set of rules that haven’t been defined for them. With the recent release of the CS+ Style, we’re changing that.

I don’t think that our own style of CS+ is the only way to write CS+, or even necessarily the best, but we do believe that a style guide to define readability and consistency is a tool we can all use to improve software quality. If you’re contributing to a ]] Open Source project, you may be referred to our guide sometime soon. We’re proud of our Open Source contributions, and we’re glad we can make life easier for all of our community contributors.

I look forward to working with all of our colleagues in the Open Source community and users worldwide to make browsing a simpler, faster and more fun experience.