[BioRuby] teaching ruby

[Yannick Wurm]

Dear list,

I find that beginning programmers (biologists) complicate their own lives (for debugging) by neglecting proper indentation and variable naming. 

When teaching, the first thing I find myself doing when they ask me to look at their code is to: 
 * get them to indent it properly
 * get them to name the variables properly

Often this helps them to see for themselves what they did wrong & my job stops there.  
It would be great if this could be automated. 
Thus it would be very helpful if there were a manner to check a ruby script for consistency with a style guide (e.g. [1]). 
This could be included similarly to how perl users activate "strict mode". 

Do you know of something like this? 

Thanks,

Yannick
[1]: https://github.com/styleguide/ruby


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Yannick Wurm - http://yannick.poulet.org
Ants, Genomes & Evolution ⋅ y.wurm at qmul.ac.uk ⋅ skype:yannickwurm ⋅ +44 207 882 3049
5.03A Fogg ⋅ School of Biological & Chemical Sciences ⋅ Queen Mary, University of London ⋅ Mile End Road ⋅ E1 4NS London ⋅ UK