4 ms·

I'm strongly against over-bearing autoformatters. In my experience a little hand crafting tweaks to formatting go a long way to increasing understandability.

I'm strongly against over-bearing autoformatters. In my experience a little hand crafting tweaks to formatting go a long way to increasing understandability. It feels like a lot of people are having issues with bikeshedding and they're using enforced autoformatters to impose their will and stifle debate they may not like. Not arguing about style is nice, but having to resort to this brutalist architecture style of code formatting doesn't seem great to me. "Its just holding people, who CARES what the building looks like!" Also thing like line-length limits. I'm with Linus on this one, enforce line-length limits causes a lot of problems, like breaking context in greps. And an autoformatter that breaks at a certain number of characters is never going to be able to understand the context to break it intelligently. Are people using editors that don't display long lines wrapping properly? Do people think everybody uses the same resolution, the same window size, the same columns per terminal, etc?

rojobuffalo 6y ago
i completely agree with you. i think the people who advocate for auto-formatters must not be very skilled at using their text-editors and/or don't put enough attention on readability/understandability. i'm happy with linters and command line tools to auto-format when you explicitly call for it, like `eslint --fix`; i'm just not on board with the formatter running on git hooks or in whatever automated workflow. almost every rule has an exception where understandability could be improved by violating the rule, ex. line length. code format is huge for understandability/readability, which makes it worth paying attention to while you're writing. in my experience the loudest advocates for code formatters are the ones who write really complicated code; which makes sense that they just hammer on code until it works without being able to reduce and simplify their logic and naming.
- rojobuffalo 6y ago
  *idk about that last part; it's a dumb anecdote. the auto-formatting i'm salty about is prettier. ones that are manually invoked and either 0 config or highly configurable (like eslint) seem sensible. use an auto-formatting hook in your text-editor if you want; i just don't like the absolutism of it being hard-baked into everyone's workflow and a tool with limited non-zero config.
- AgentME 6y ago
  I swear by auto-formatters, and I've always been good at making readable code. I love auto-formatters because it makes everyone else's code readable too even if they're bad at formatting it themselves.

rojobuffalo 6y ago

i completely agree with you. i think the people who advocate for auto-formatters must not be very skilled at using their text-editors and/or don't put enough attention on readability/understandability. i'm happy with linters and command line tools to auto-format when you explicitly call for it, like `eslint --fix`; i'm just not on board with the formatter running on git hooks or in whatever automated workflow. almost every rule has an exception where understandability could be improved by violating the rule, ex. line length. code format is huge for understandability/readability, which makes it worth paying attention to while you're writing. in my experience the loudest advocates for code formatters are the ones who write really complicated code; which makes sense that they just hammer on code until it works without being able to reduce and simplify their logic and naming.

rojobuffalo 6y ago
*idk about that last part; it's a dumb anecdote. the auto-formatting i'm salty about is prettier. ones that are manually invoked and either 0 config or highly configurable (like eslint) seem sensible. use an auto-formatting hook in your text-editor if you want; i just don't like the absolutism of it being hard-baked into everyone's workflow and a tool with limited non-zero config.
AgentME 6y ago
I swear by auto-formatters, and I've always been good at making readable code. I love auto-formatters because it makes everyone else's code readable too even if they're bad at formatting it themselves.