I love this. I've always followed this guideline without thinking about how to communicate it.

I'm fairly sure that single quotes are much more common in the UK in literature, though, so this only feels like it makes sense to NA and AU speakers.

> I'm fairly sure that single quotes are much more common in the UK in literature, though

It's just that the primary/secondary role is reversed. (This is also reflected in which one you have to hold Shift for on a computer keyboard.)

I like that Erlang more or less enforces that rule: strings are double-quoted, symbols are single-quoted, you generally use symbols for "programmatic strings".

[$i, $n, $d, $e, $e, $d].

ITYM: [$i|[$n|[$d|[$e|[$e|[$d]]]]]].

Yes "Indeed".

Funny, I came here to suggest the same thing. It's a good rule.

It's not a good rule because nobody else uses it, so it's just going to make the code inconsistent when someone else works on it.

All good rules started by nobody else using it. Though, in this case, at least three people discovered that rule independently.

And +1. I thought it's just me. It works quite well in practice and can be applied to many languages. Unfortunately in quite a few of them out prevents interpolation, so it's not a 100% solution.

> Unfortunately in quite a few of them out prevents interpolation, so it's not a 100% solution.

A bigger issue IME is languages (mostly of the C family) where single-quoting is for character literals.

Also in Smalltalk comments are double-quoted, but that's a pretty rare language to encounter.

A lot of people use it. That's how I was taught to write Python and that's how I wrote it in several different companies. At my current job we use double-quotes for everything though (for some reason).

I do. People I work with do. People I mentor do.