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> You may not be aware but thanks to all those donations, we've been able to pay two people $1.5k/month for the past two years to keep shipping. Fisker Cheung a
by shrimpx 3y ago
> You may not be aware but thanks to all those donations, we've been able to pay two people $1.5k/month for the past two years to keep shipping. Fisker Cheung and Sosuke Suzuki have done an incredible job!
It's incredible how little money some people get paid to build foundational pieces in a multi-trillion dollar industry.
- uxp8u61q 3y agoI don't want to disparage prettier, but to call it a foundational piece...
- fallat 3y agoI agree. Foundational isn't the right word here. I would though accept "impactful". A lot of people care about code formatting "taken care of".
- wentin 3y agoMaybe essential is a better word.
- austin-cheney 3y agoThat is still far too much an exaggeration. This is an opinionated beautifier. Its a vanity item with some downstream utility benefits.
- cdmckay 3y agoA formatter is pretty essential when working in a team. It saves tons of time wasted on code formatting in code reviews.
- 0x0000000 3y ago> A formatter is pretty essential when working in a team. I worked on a team without a formatter for more than 5 years. I'm certain many people have done the same. "Essential" is overselling.
- aniforprez 3y agoI think at this point I would consider a formatter essential for working with a team. It helps make code style opinionated and fixed and I have no surprises when reading code. No one doing weird formatting to align random things. Any formatting tool that allows for pages upon pages of options is simply not something I want to deal with. Something like black, gofmt and prettier is vital
- austin-cheney 3y agoBike shedding. I say this as somebody who has written a once prominent JavaScript code beautifier. Automating code beautification is a nice to have. It becomes essential when developers cannot be bothered to focus on more important things because either more important things are too challenging for the given developers or because the given developers want to feel more important than their contributions/decisions are actually worth.
- shrimpx 3y agoAuto formatting tools like prettier and black didn’t use to be essential but they’re quickly becoming essential. Just look at the growth curves for pip and npm installs. I for one feel like my editor is broken if it doesn’t auto format on save.
- gardenhedge 3y agoHow about ubiquitous?
- silverlyra 3y agoWhen seeing Prettier as a software tool, to consider Prettier more “foundational” than (e.g.) TypeScript or V8 does seem like an inversion of hierarchy [1] – but viewed as history, as a practice, Prettier’s accomplishment of making automatic code formatting (à la `go fmt` or Python `black`) widespread in JavaScript, the lingua franca of programming, is foundational. All that time spent staring at code that could have been more readable, or writing style guides and reformatting code, is now spent doing what we were trying to do in the first place. And now, speeding up the time we wait to apply formatting or check it in CI by rewriting it in Rust™ gives us a bit more of that time back. :) [1]: https://youtu.be/ar9WRwCiSr0 https://youtu.be/ar9WRwCiSr0
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoI wouldn't call it foundational, but it would be one of the first things I'd set up in a new JS based project, alongside unit tests, com/transpiling and eslint.
- fallat 3y agoNerd sniping is incredibly effective. I would say it's abused quite often too. I don't know what to say other than, if these people are out of a job, and you're a company funding prettier or need good JS people, please hire them.
- shepherdjerred 3y agoLike the others said, Prettier isn't foundational. That said, it brings in _much_ more value than $1.5k/mo. It has eliminated styling arguments on teams that adopt it. The amount of time saved in PRs/reduction of bikeshedding is very valuable.
- The_Colonel 3y agoMeh, most devs I've met can format code better than Prettier. Having a consistent set of rules sounds alluring at first, but the issue is that mechanical application is, well, mechanical and therefore dumb. My personal impression is that the code style bike shedding is a sign of team immaturity. In the more mature teams (composed of more mature persons), I haven't really seen formatting bike shedding.
- saila 3y agoI used to be one of those devs, thinking I had the most beautiful coding style. When I embraced formatters, I started spending so much less time and effort keeping the style "correct" and worrying about how other people on the team format code. I love just hitting save in my editor and having the code formatted without having to fiddle with quotes, wrapping, etc. With regard to bike-shedding about style, it mostly goes away once a team adopts one of the standard formatters for a given language. That's sort of the whole point.
- joshxyz 3y agoYeah right until you're working in a team of 30+ people without a code formatter like Prettier. Since when did caring about readability equated to bike-shedding and immaturity?
- The_Colonel 3y agoI work in like ~100-person team without code formatter and it's fine. The age average is ~35. > Since when did caring about readability equated to bike-shedding and immaturity? Since never, I didn't claim that. On the contrary, Prettier leads to less readable code than what a human can produce. Bike-shedding is endless bickering about some specific, meaningless thing.
- jejeyyy77 3y agothis, lol. Even a $20K bounty for that amount of work doesn't even seem worth it to boot up my IDE.