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Comment by nphase | Hacker News Reader

I was afraid to read the style guide for fear of seeing K&R vs Allman indents/braces. As usual, it was hit on. However, to my amusement, the "Right" way of doing things actually has a syntax error:

  if (true) {
    console.log('winning);
  }

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I have been personally screamed at for suggesting One True Brace Style over K&R in response to a request for feedback on an architecture standards document. That was when I learned that corporate architecture teams don't actually want to get feedback when they ask for it.

I find it odd that I have a strong opinion on the topic but have never seen a convincing argument that one way is actually better than another, it's just that one feels right to me and the others don't and I can't articulate but neither can anyone else I've seen.

I don't know about other languages but there are real practical reasons to choose 1TBS in Javascript, consider the following code:

    return {
        key: 'value',
        anotherKey: 'another value'
    }

This is fine and works as expected, now consider the following K&R/Allman style code...

    return
    {
        key: 'value',
        anotherKey: 'another value'
    }

In Javascript this is parsed as `return;` (notice the semi-colon), this is because Javascript does its dreaded automatic semicolon insertion magic.

So, I think that's a pretty good practical reason to prefer 1TBS in Javascript.

I favour a mix of the two in javascript - 1TBS for object literals and anonymous functions, K&R for conditionals and named functions.

Thank you! I didn't actually know this and would have completely missed that bug.

Fixed. Sorry, I was typing most of this on my iPad.

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