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I feel similar about languages and style-guides, but I didn't want to conflate the two in my previous comment. Unless you are a royal newb and just learning to
by dcow 4y ago
I feel similar about languages and style-guides, but I didn't want to conflate the two in my previous comment. Unless you are a royal newb and just learning to write code (which is fine, everybody has to learn), you’re probably writing code in a way that best expresses your intent or goal given your understanding of the language. Let people do that! If you know the language you can handle encountering different styles and structures. Otherwise you’re just forcing your preferred subset of hoe the language can be used to express things. I just don't like regression to the mean.
- kqr 4y agoThis is something I've come to realise as I've matured as a developer. I just don't care what style you write in, if you don't use all the syntactic sugar, etc. I care where you draw your module boundaries, which units depend on which, and if you've handled edge cases, and so on. That's what's going to matter in the end. That's where I'll have to spend a lot of time figuring stuff out. Not syntax.
- dcow 4y agoExactly. I’ve seen style-perfect lint-free “write once” spaghetti code that drops edge cases and error conditions left and right, and I’ve seen “ugly” but clean code that needs no introduction and works perfectly to boot. I worry that auto-formatters (not to discredit their upsides) do sometimes give people a false sense that they’re writing good code.
- Aeolun 4y agoI don’t care about styling, and that is exactly why I use (and enforce use of) an autoformatter.
- shepherdjerred 4y agoI use auto-formatters so that I don't have to deal with coworkers telling me to add a new line or that I put too many/few levels of indentation. Formatters do nothing for code quality. Linters can help quality but it's more of a last line of defense for common errors, not a signal that your code is 'good'.