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Contributing

All contributions are welcome, from the tiniest typo to a brand new article. Translations in all languages are welcome (or, for that matter, original articles in any language). Send a pull request or open an issue any time of day or night.

Please prepend the tag [language/lang-code] to your issues and pull requests. For example, [python/en] for English Python. This will help everyone pick out things they care about.

We're happy for any contribution in any form, but if you're making more than one major change (i.e. translations for two different languages) it would be super cool of you to make a separate pull request for each one so that someone can review them more effectively and/or individually.

Style Guidelines

  • Keep lines of under 80 chars
    • Try to keep line length in code blocks to 80 characters or fewer.
    • Otherwise, the text will overflow and look odd.
  • Prefer example to exposition
    • Try to use as few words as possible.
    • Code examples are preferred over exposition in all cases.
  • Eschew surplusage
    • We welcome newcomers, but the target audience for this site is programmers with some experience.
    • Try to avoid explaining basic concepts except for those specific to the language in question.
    • Keep articles succinct and scannable. We all know how to use Google here.
  • Use UTF-8
    • For translations (or EN articles with non-ASCII characters) please make sure your file is UTF-8 encoded.
    • Try to leave out the byte-order-mark at the start of the file. (:set nobomb in Vim)

Header configuration

The actual site uses Middleman to generate HTML files from these Markdown ones. Middleman, or at least the custom scripts underpinning the site, requires that some key information be defined in the header.

The following fields are necessary for English articles about programming languages:

  • language The programming language in question
  • contributors A list of [author, URL] lists to credit

Other fields:

  • filename: The filename for this article's code. It will be fetched, mashed together, and made downloadable.
    • For non-English articles, filename should have a language-specific suffix.
  • lang: For translations, the human language this article is in. For categorization, mostly.

Here's an example header for an Esperanto translation of Ruby:

---
language: ruby
filename: learnruby-epo.ruby
contributors:
    - ["Doktor Esperanto", "http://example.com/"]
    - ["Someone else", "http://someoneelseswebsite.com/"]
lang: ep-ep
---