4 ms·

So many hours have been saved thanks to formatters. Not only writing it, but also countless hours in PR-reviews without senseless nitpicking. One of the best t

• judofyr 5y ago
  > Not only writing it, but also countless hours in PR-reviews without senseless nitpicking. I've never understood this point. Programmers will always find something they can nitpick about. Ultimately you want a culture which focuses on the critical parts: Correctness of code, good test coverage, big-picture architecture which has long-term impact. Bringing an auto-formatter into the picture may reduce some senseless nitpicking, but you haven't actually done anything to solve the real culture problem. If your team was getting blocked because people were arguing about formatting you have bigger problems that won't be magically solved by adding an auto-formatter. To give some examples: A while back I worked with one person on a project where we had both Prettier and super strict ESLint, and I would still get PRs rejected because they wanted the code to be slightly refactored in a way which was entirely subjective and had no impact of the correctness (e.g. "flip this negation") . And right now I'm working on a team where we explicitly tag some PR comments with "nitpick". This will not block the PR from getting merged, but instead it's a way of saying "I prefer it this way, but it's not that important in the bigger scheme of things". This is also a signal that it's not something that we want to start a bigger discussion around. (We use auto-formatters and linters as they are very useful.)
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]