carbon-lang/proposals/p0149_decision.md

Decision for: Change markdown style guide

Proposal accepted on 2020-09-22

Affirming:

• chandlerc
• geoffromer
• noncombatant
• tituswinters
• zygoloid

Abstaining:

• austern
• josh11b
• gribozavr

Open questions

Which style guide?

The core team decided to let the Painter choose the style guide to be used. The painter selected to continue using the Google documentation markdown style guide.

Rationale

The core team reached consensus that there should be a style guide, but did not have a strong preference between the Google style guide and the Microsoft style guide. One advantage of the Microsoft style guide is that it is less Google-centric, which could contribute somewhat to our community goal. Given the level of experience of the core team members with these style guides, it is not clear that a well-informed decision could be made. As such, the core team decided to leave the decision of the specific style guide up to the Painter.

Painter rationale

Given the lack of a high level reason to pick one over the other, the painter looked at the available tooling for linting against the two options and spoke with people who have written substantial developer documentation against both style guides. There was no persuasive reason to change from the Google documentation style guide at this time. Specific ambiguities or problems with that style guide should instead be addressed, if necessary at all, with Carbon-specific local rule.