Discursive Strategies in Style Guides Negotiation on GitHub

This article examines the discursive strategies at play in style guide negotiation on GitHub. Looking at three popular guides for the JavaScript language—Standard, Airbnb, Prettier—, we highlight how source code, executable code, networks of communities and platform affordances are used as arguments of their own in the adoption and modification of theoretically immutable documents. Through discourse analysis, we show how programmers display multifaceted practices in a social context of work, modulated by technical affordances of platforms and programming languages.