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Community Standards (Clojure)
- fogus 16y agoThe post mentions Clojure only tangentially. The larger point can apply to any programming language community.
- sprout 16y agoWould be good to retitle it. This is a really excellent article and I suspect there are a lot of people who will skim past any link with Clojure in the title.
- mahmud 16y agoYou should have said something that day when some guy at #clojure threw a hissy-fit because I told him not to camelCase Lisp code.
- falko 16y agoGreat. Thank you ;-))
- lmkg 16y agoHow hard is it to throw together an Emacs command that re-styles your parenthesis? I know the creators of Go went so far as a to make a program that converts "valid" Go code into "canonical" Go code. Parentheses seem like an easy problem to solve. If people can re-parenthesize their code with the press of a button, you can still have the community interoperability without having to sacrifice inclusiveness of personal eccentricities.
- itgoon 16y agoI don't know. I know that other IDEs have such functionality for other languages. I don't worry too much about the previous developer's style, because reformatting is a couple of simple keystrokes. As is reformatting it to another's standard. I think it is a bit odd that anybody still has this argument.
- fogus 16y agoIt's not a matter of forming the parens into another style -- that's a solved problem. The problem is that sticking to individual styles can hurt the adoption or contributions to a project.
- weavejester 16y agoI'd imagine the problem is more when two developers with different formatting preferences are working on the same project at the same time.
- itistoday 16y ago1) You lose credibility (whether its unfounded or not is irrelevant) 2) People refuse to spend much time looking at your code Over the years I've spent coding I've learned not to judge other coders based on their preferred style. Often enough I'll encounter really brilliant code whose style I find aesthetically unappealing (or "non-standard"), and I would have been worse off if I chose to ignore it. Some people just Think Different, and that's not always a bad thing. Conversely, I've learned that prickly people who get red-faced upon encountering an unfamiliar style are often worth avoiding.
- fogus 16y agoI can sympathize completely with your viewpoint, but in my experience it is a minority one. I tend to value code based on its technical merit as well, but non-standard formatting can work to distract from the very recognition of its beauty. I would not want to disparage anyone their preferred styling. My only point is that you sacrifice a wider audience by sticking to it.
- technomancy 16y ago> I can sympathize completely with your viewpoint, but in my experience it is a minority one. It's much more common in C and descendants, which saw widespread use before the rise of the Internet.
- rauljara 16y agoThe essay itself is a pretty wonderful merging of form and content. At its very best, form helps to convey content. As seen here.
- j_baker 16y agoI think Doug Hoyte put it best: "An auxiliary theme of this book, one that applies to any programming language, is that in programming, style is not something to pursue directly. Style is necessary only where understanding is missing." For instance, as a python programmer, I find it intensely annoying when people don't follow PEP 8 and might complain about it. But the fact that it's the most important thing on my mind means that I haven't really understood the code. Unless the violations are truly flagrant (such as putting commas in the left margin rather than after the word), then move on with life. We programmers have enough to worry about without having to nitpick over others' paren placement.