6 ms·

IME linting picks up about 99% fluff (ooh look there's some whitespace on a blank line) and 1% potential issues highlighted (usually minor). The reason people

IME linting picks up about 99% fluff (ooh look there's some whitespace on a blank line) and 1% potential issues highlighted (usually minor). The reason people like to default to linting when "fixing code quality issues" is purely because it's 100% objective and measurable, not because it picks up the truly important issues. It doesn't. Edit: I am aware that coders have OCD impulses which can be sated with a linter, but priority #1 when fixing spaghetti code is unraveling the spaghetti, not sating your need to see }s in a place that makes you feel better.

mathgeek 9y ago
Most linters allow you to disable whitespace linting. Good tools allow you to learn to use them better.
simonpantzare 9y ago
I'd argue that there's a significant mental overhead reading code when it doesn't follow the same conventions, and that enforcing a style guide is a matter of having no broken windows. But of course there's no point trying to make shit look good.
- dep_b 9y ago
  A linter and code conventions are a way to make code more consistent and easier to switch between. At times it becomes hard to see what code you wrote and what somebody else wrote, which is a good thing. If I open a file and everything "just feels wrong" but I can't change it because enforcing my personal preferences are just my personal preferences is just making things worse that really takes some valuable energy away I could use for actually improving things. But I can get used to a coding guideline that's not 100% my preference but a well enforced and consistent one. Knowing that if I fix indenting and naming the fix will not enrage someone else.
  - dasmoth 9y ago
    At times it becomes hard to see what code you wrote and what somebody else wrote, which is a good thing. I suspect this is the big point of disagreement between lint-advocates and many of those who are dubious. I generally don’t see big wins from collectivising code, and on the who prefer to treat people I’m working with as individuals who can be interacted with 1:1 vs an amorphous “the team” writing “the codebase”.
    - dep_b 9y ago
      Usually there’s a style that’s mandated by large authorities like C# formatting is mandated by Microsoft and JetBrains. Copying their style gets you there for 80%. The rest is whatever you agree on and usually not something that bothers me. If you’re the guy that thinks having a 300 line function in an 8000 line class is just an individual way of expressing yourself you’ll have to fight me. If you think real tabs is better than 4 spaces I shrug and let you have it your way.
      - dasmoth 9y ago
        The fact that you’ve named an IDE vendor rather emphasises that there is a substantial gray area. By no means everyone wants to use an IDE (let alone that specific one...)
        dep_b 9y ago
        True. But for Objective-C I often used the NY Times style guide. Just whatever the one is that is the most complete and most easy to maintain really. But I notice with C# that if I copy-paste reasonably fresh code from Stack Overflow to VS + RS I sometimes get zero warnings because the other programmer uses exactly the same toolchain and style. Same goes for Python PEP8 in PyCharm. Personally I like the idea of having a strong similarity in code style within an ecosystem, especially when dealing with libraries that more or less follow the same conventions as the code that I wrote myself.
lloeki 9y ago
We did that (rubocop). Lots of fluff, a dozen or three minor to medium issues, and a couple of downright critical ones that slipped through production cracks out of sheer luck. Not even counting the last ones, the holistic effect of having a code base normalized is unmeasurable (i.e == through the roof), because suddenly moving from one part of the code to another is consistent enough that it removes a mental barrier to seeing patterns and enabling refactoring.
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  IMO there are two features which linting tools need before I can start treating them as serious "necessities" on a code base rather than "nice to haves". lint [cosmetic | medium | serious] - you must select one to run the tool, and the rule defaults must be sensible. No "100 character line length" in 'medium'. That's strictly cosmetic. Serious is for initialized and unused variables and the like - things which you might plausibly say "I'm not unhappy that broke the build because it could have indicated a bug". lint medium --against=branch - the linting tool should be able to intelligently compare against a baseline branch and only warn you about issues on code you have actually touched. I do not agree that the holistic effect of having a code base "normalized" is "through the roof". I think the cost is relatively high while the benefits are relatively low. Right now at work if I run a linter against my code there are about 10,000 "issues" - the top 50 of which are completely cosmetic and I'd be remiss to invest time in fixing them. I'm not opposed to linters on principle and I do use them, I just think that there's almost always bigger fish to fry.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    pylint has different levels you can select (convention, refactor, warning, error), not sure if it's a common feature. For the second, see git-lint: https://github.com/sk-/git-lint https://github.com/sk-/git-lint
  - dasmoth 9y ago
    Yep, a tool that did all of this might be enough to convince me.
  - 9y ago
troels 9y ago
Depends. Some programmers have absolutely no hygiene wrt formatting. You'd want that sorted for readability. But the bigger point is that you reduce merge conflicts since you won't have all sorts of unrelated formatting changes mixed in with the real changes.
- ionforce 9y ago
  > Some programmers have absolutely no hygiene wrt formatting. I don't know how these kinds of people live with themselves or are tolerated by others. I hate it.
bunderbunder 9y ago
I agree, linting doesn't pick up much. But, at places I've worked where the codebase was kept linted, the humans did a better job of catching bugs in code review. My guess is that, when you have a cosmetically messy code base, people start to develop a lower standard for what counts a understanding the code they're reading. Probably as a self-preservation mechanism. There's only so much time in a day.
- ryanianian 9y ago
  Also: if your coworkers care enough about quality to add and maintain a linter, they're the kind of coworkers that care to do good code-reviews and maintain a high quality bar.
jerf 9y ago
"IME linting picks up about 99% fluff (ooh look there's some whitespace on a blank line) and 1% potential issues highlighted (usually minor)." What language are you using? Dynamic languages are fairly difficult to meaningfully lint because it's hard enough just to analyze a function for problems, let alone extend past that. Static languages are easier to write non-trivial linters for, because there's more information just sitting there in the source, waiting for something to grab it. But even for dynamic languages, linters can still do things like enforce documentation standards, code testing/coverage standards, and some other basics that may sound trivial, but still add up to very useful things.
- spc476 9y ago
  I find luacheck (a linter for Lua) invaluable for picking up typos, unused variables, variables shadowing other variables and unintentional global use (since Lua defaults to global by default). The types of checks seems mostly reasonable to me [1][2]. [1] http://luacheck.readthedocs.io/en/stable/warnings.html http://luacheck.readthedocs.io/en/stable/warnings.html [2] I'm not entirely happy with the formatting issues, but they can be easily disabled. Edit: hit submit by mistake.
sjellis 9y ago
"The reason people like to default to linting when "fixing code quality issues" is purely because it's 100% objective and measurable, not because it picks up the truly important issues. It doesn't." I think that ideally, linting and especially formatting help quality by taking the trivial issues off the table. If your code is currently "clean", and the tools reformat or flag the code that you just wrote, then hopefully those issues will never be committed into the repository, so human code review can be about substantive points.

mathgeek 9y ago

Most linters allow you to disable whitespace linting. Good tools allow you to learn to use them better.

simonpantzare 9y ago

I'd argue that there's a significant mental overhead reading code when it doesn't follow the same conventions, and that enforcing a style guide is a matter of having no broken windows. But of course there's no point trying to make shit look good.

dep_b 9y ago
A linter and code conventions are a way to make code more consistent and easier to switch between. At times it becomes hard to see what code you wrote and what somebody else wrote, which is a good thing. If I open a file and everything "just feels wrong" but I can't change it because enforcing my personal preferences are just my personal preferences is just making things worse that really takes some valuable energy away I could use for actually improving things. But I can get used to a coding guideline that's not 100% my preference but a well enforced and consistent one. Knowing that if I fix indenting and naming the fix will not enrage someone else.
- dasmoth 9y ago
  At times it becomes hard to see what code you wrote and what somebody else wrote, which is a good thing. I suspect this is the big point of disagreement between lint-advocates and many of those who are dubious. I generally don’t see big wins from collectivising code, and on the who prefer to treat people I’m working with as individuals who can be interacted with 1:1 vs an amorphous “the team” writing “the codebase”.
  - dep_b 9y ago
    Usually there’s a style that’s mandated by large authorities like C# formatting is mandated by Microsoft and JetBrains. Copying their style gets you there for 80%. The rest is whatever you agree on and usually not something that bothers me. If you’re the guy that thinks having a 300 line function in an 8000 line class is just an individual way of expressing yourself you’ll have to fight me. If you think real tabs is better than 4 spaces I shrug and let you have it your way.
    - dasmoth 9y ago
      The fact that you’ve named an IDE vendor rather emphasises that there is a substantial gray area. By no means everyone wants to use an IDE (let alone that specific one...)
      - dep_b 9y ago
        True. But for Objective-C I often used the NY Times style guide. Just whatever the one is that is the most complete and most easy to maintain really. But I notice with C# that if I copy-paste reasonably fresh code from Stack Overflow to VS + RS I sometimes get zero warnings because the other programmer uses exactly the same toolchain and style. Same goes for Python PEP8 in PyCharm. Personally I like the idea of having a strong similarity in code style within an ecosystem, especially when dealing with libraries that more or less follow the same conventions as the code that I wrote myself.

lloeki 9y ago

We did that (rubocop). Lots of fluff, a dozen or three minor to medium issues, and a couple of downright critical ones that slipped through production cracks out of sheer luck. Not even counting the last ones, the holistic effect of having a code base normalized is unmeasurable (i.e == through the roof), because suddenly moving from one part of the code to another is consistent enough that it removes a mental barrier to seeing patterns and enabling refactoring.

crdoconnor 9y ago
IMO there are two features which linting tools need before I can start treating them as serious "necessities" on a code base rather than "nice to haves". lint [cosmetic | medium | serious] - you must select one to run the tool, and the rule defaults must be sensible. No "100 character line length" in 'medium'. That's strictly cosmetic. Serious is for initialized and unused variables and the like - things which you might plausibly say "I'm not unhappy that broke the build because it could have indicated a bug". lint medium --against=branch - the linting tool should be able to intelligently compare against a baseline branch and only warn you about issues on code you have actually touched. I do not agree that the holistic effect of having a code base "normalized" is "through the roof". I think the cost is relatively high while the benefits are relatively low. Right now at work if I run a linter against my code there are about 10,000 "issues" - the top 50 of which are completely cosmetic and I'd be remiss to invest time in fixing them. I'm not opposed to linters on principle and I do use them, I just think that there's almost always bigger fish to fry.
- icebraining 9y ago
  pylint has different levels you can select (convention, refactor, warning, error), not sure if it's a common feature. For the second, see git-lint: https://github.com/sk-/git-lint https://github.com/sk-/git-lint
- dasmoth 9y ago
  Yep, a tool that did all of this might be enough to convince me.
- 9y ago

troels 9y ago

Depends. Some programmers have absolutely no hygiene wrt formatting. You'd want that sorted for readability. But the bigger point is that you reduce merge conflicts since you won't have all sorts of unrelated formatting changes mixed in with the real changes.

ionforce 9y ago
> Some programmers have absolutely no hygiene wrt formatting. I don't know how these kinds of people live with themselves or are tolerated by others. I hate it.

bunderbunder 9y ago

I agree, linting doesn't pick up much. But, at places I've worked where the codebase was kept linted, the humans did a better job of catching bugs in code review. My guess is that, when you have a cosmetically messy code base, people start to develop a lower standard for what counts a understanding the code they're reading. Probably as a self-preservation mechanism. There's only so much time in a day.

ryanianian 9y ago
Also: if your coworkers care enough about quality to add and maintain a linter, they're the kind of coworkers that care to do good code-reviews and maintain a high quality bar.

jerf 9y ago

"IME linting picks up about 99% fluff (ooh look there's some whitespace on a blank line) and 1% potential issues highlighted (usually minor)." What language are you using? Dynamic languages are fairly difficult to meaningfully lint because it's hard enough just to analyze a function for problems, let alone extend past that. Static languages are easier to write non-trivial linters for, because there's more information just sitting there in the source, waiting for something to grab it. But even for dynamic languages, linters can still do things like enforce documentation standards, code testing/coverage standards, and some other basics that may sound trivial, but still add up to very useful things.

spc476 9y ago
I find luacheck (a linter for Lua) invaluable for picking up typos, unused variables, variables shadowing other variables and unintentional global use (since Lua defaults to global by default). The types of checks seems mostly reasonable to me [1][2]. [1] http://luacheck.readthedocs.io/en/stable/warnings.html http://luacheck.readthedocs.io/en/stable/warnings.html [2] I'm not entirely happy with the formatting issues, but they can be easily disabled. Edit: hit submit by mistake.

sjellis 9y ago

"The reason people like to default to linting when "fixing code quality issues" is purely because it's 100% objective and measurable, not because it picks up the truly important issues. It doesn't." I think that ideally, linting and especially formatting help quality by taking the trivial issues off the table. If your code is currently "clean", and the tools reformat or flag the code that you just wrote, then hopefully those issues will never be committed into the repository, so human code review can be about substantive points.