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> But certainly for C-like languages I've used, just getting people on the same team to all use the same format was a struggle, much less the whole company, muc

> But certainly for C-like languages I've used, just getting people on the same team to all use the same format was a struggle, much less the whole company, much much less the whole world. clang-format has really changed the game here. It's commonplace in large projects to run it on every commit. There is a difference between C and C++ formatting and Go formatting, and it's that Go had gofmt from the start and has always had large social pressure to conform to it. Contrary to popular sentiment, I'm not sure that this is an unmitigated good, though. The reason is that clang-format was designed to mimic the existing style that emerges when programmers manually format code for maximum readability. This forced clang-format to consider comment formatting, line length, argument bin packing, etc. It had to be good, or else it wouldn't get use. On the other hand, because gofmt was guaranteed to get lots of use no matter what, there was less pressure for the result to be readable. This shows up in decisions like the lack of a line length limit.

dilap 9y ago
(That's cool to hear about clang-format; I've been out the C++ game for a while, except for the occasional nostalgic prog comp.) Well, again, I personally don't think line limit should be part of the code style -- it's really handy to be able to split or not split emacs buffers and have the code spill out to take up the space, wrapping dynamically. If the code hard-wraps, you're just stuck w/ that single decision. It's annoying. Regarding Go's style more generally: Yeah, my own personal pref would be much denser that gofmt, but I happily submit for the consistency. I just don't think style really matters that much (within the realm of reasonable, which gofmt certainly is): the important thing is consistency. (By the way, a nice side-effect of consistency: you can easily grep for a particular thing w/ confidence w/o having to try to take into account all the possible stylistic variations.)

dilap 9y ago

(That's cool to hear about clang-format; I've been out the C++ game for a while, except for the occasional nostalgic prog comp.) Well, again, I personally don't think line limit should be part of the code style -- it's really handy to be able to split or not split emacs buffers and have the code spill out to take up the space, wrapping dynamically. If the code hard-wraps, you're just stuck w/ that single decision. It's annoying. Regarding Go's style more generally: Yeah, my own personal pref would be much denser that gofmt, but I happily submit for the consistency. I just don't think style really matters that much (within the realm of reasonable, which gofmt certainly is): the important thing is consistency. (By the way, a nice side-effect of consistency: you can easily grep for a particular thing w/ confidence w/o having to try to take into account all the possible stylistic variations.)