LFE Style Guide

1 Introduction

1.1 Motivation and Purpose

LFE has, since its inception in 2008, become increasinly popular in the Erlang and Lisp communities. Contributions to the source code, examples, third-party libraries, and LFE-based applications have steadily risen and are currently undergoing a sharp increase.

As such, our community now has the need for resources we can provide for new-comers -- both to assist in their LFE literacy as well as make contributions easier to write and then get approved for merge.

In summary, this guide recommends formatting and stylistic choices designed to make your code easier for other people to understand.

1.2 License

The material in this document is licensed under Creative Commons 3.0 BY, the same license as the majority of the source material in the The Common Lisp Style Guide.

1.3 Sources

The LFE Style Guide has several sources. The majority of the text is taken directly from the The Common Lisp Style Guide.

Additional sources include the following:

1.4 Differences from The Common Lisp Style Guide

Large portions of the Common Lisp Style Guide are more formal or too specific to Common Lisp itself to be appropriate for the LFE Style Guide. As such, that content has not been adapted to LFE.

The recent versions of the Common Lisp Style Guide are targeted at Lisp usage inside Google. The LFE Style Guide changes the portions of the guide focused on groups inside Google to instead refer to the larger open source community, the Erlang community, or the LFE community and associated projects.

1.5 Credits

Contributors to the Common Lisp Style Guide:

  • Adam Worrall
  • Dan Pierson
  • Matt Marjanovic
  • Matt Reklaitis
  • Paul Weiss
  • Scott McKay
  • Sundar Narasimhan, and several others

Editors of the Common Lisp Style Guide:

  • Dan Weinreb
  • François-René Rideau
  • Jeremy Brown
  • Robert Brown

Google is the current sponsor of the Common Lisp Style guide.

Authors of Tutorial on Good Lisp Programming Style:

  • Peter Norvig
  • Kent Pitman

Learn You Some Erlang

  • Fred Hebert

Creator of LFE:

  • Robert Virding

Editors of the LFE Style Guide:

  • Duncan McGreggor

1.6 See Also

Also be sure to read the related guide, LFE Programming Rules and Conventions.