Guideline Manifesto

Intro by Chris Lunsford (@cmlccie)

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"All right... all right... but apart from better sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health... what have the Romans ever done for us?" -THE LIFE OF BRIAN

What good comes from coding standards? ...just about all of the above.

We aren't setting out to recreate anything here, but rather to document and evolve the practices (not best practices) that we as Cisco DevNet content creators and contributors happily follow in an attempt to marshal consistency and set forth well written, well read, understandable and maintainable code.

Indeed we may say that we follow the Zen of Python and reserve the right to add our own principles of eternal truth as may seem us well.

Beautiful is better than ugly.

Explicit is better than implicit.

Simple is better than complex.

Complex is better than complicated.

Flat is better than nested.

Sparse is better than dense.

Readability counts.

Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.

Although practicality beats purity.

Errors should never pass silently.

Unless explicitly silenced.

In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.

There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.

Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.

Now is better than never.

Although never is often better than right now.

If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.

If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.

Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!