4 ms·
Out of curiosity, why? If whitespace is merely an artifact of human readability, why permit (or why not restrict) infinite bikeshedding on that?
by yawpitch 3y ago
Out of curiosity, why? If whitespace is merely an artifact of human readability, why permit (or why not restrict) infinite bikeshedding on that?
- dtagames 3y agoI'll bite. Code is read more often than it is written. Readability leads to comprehension (or detracts from it). So forcing a programmer to lay out code in the designer's favorite format is a net negative for people who can read it easier laid out a different way. Thus, the number of IDE formatters and options we have in languages like JS.
- yawpitch 3y agoThere being no known metric for how _readable_ semantically isomorphic whitespace changes make code, but there being _many_ ways of measuring how much time is spent on shifting whitespace around, I tend to think language communities like Go and gofmt are on to something. Assuming the language actually has a community then it’s not exactly the designer’s preference, ultimately, it’s the community’s.