The New York Times has a long history of publishing style guides. We first released The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage in 1950 so that reporters inside and outside The Times could have a definitive resource for our somewhat quirky rules. In 2002, we published an update to that guide, and NYTimes journalists and editors use a frequently updated online reference version every day.
But what about style for our favorite programming languages? At The Times, software developers are as obsessed with brackets and braces as journalists are with word choice and punctuation. Many software engineering teams here even maintain their own coding style guides and standards. Having a codified programming style and well-documented coding conventions makes it much easier to work on large software projects, to welcome new team members and to prevent frustrating inconsistencies.
The iOS team has been working on our style guide for over a year and we finally decided that it’s time to share it with the Objective-C community. The guide was originally proposed by my friend and teammate Brian Capps who took it upon himself to write the initial draft. The team has discussed the guide in person, in pull requests and over e-mail for long enough that we’re all fairly comfortable with it, but it’s by no means static. Changes are frequently proposed and incorporated, and we’re hoping that you’ll help us improve it even more.
We’re hosting the guide on GitHub, so that you can fork it, submit pull requests and file issues to propose new rules and update existing ones.
At The Times, we care deeply about all the words we write â€" help us make the ones read by compilers as good as the ones in the newspaper.
Matthew Bischoff is a senior mobile software engineer at The New York Times.
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