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This isn’t actually true. Prettier does break code in strange circumstances and it can be very difficult to fix. The maintainers have a ton of stress on them an

This isn’t actually true. Prettier does break code in strange circumstances and it can be very difficult to fix. The maintainers have a ton of stress on them and it’s hard to improve it sometimes. It’s very well tested and easy to add cases too - just add an input and an output so that may be why it seems so solid, just whenever there is an issue people fix it. I think the main thing is that Meta maintains it which probably is why it’s so solid.

goodoldneon 3y ago
What’s an example of Prettier breaking code?
- wildpeaks 3y ago
  Another example: https://github.com/prettier/prettier/issues/187 https://github.com/prettier/prettier/issues/187 That issue has been open for 7 years.
  - w23j 3y ago
    The removal of the parentheses does not change the behavior of the program. I guess that would not be considered "breaking" the code.
  - Gianna12 3y ago
    [flagged]
- blopker 3y ago
  The biggest issue I run in to is with Django HTML. It's unusable. They know about it and they said they won't fix it.
- exac 3y ago
  For example, the latest Prettier makes XHTML files invalid by changing DOCTYPE to lowercase: https://github.com/prettier/prettier/issues/15476 https://github.com/prettier/prettier/issues/15476 Prettier moves ts-ignore comments which can cause TypeScript errors: https://github.com/prettier/prettier/issues/15876 https://github.com/prettier/prettier/issues/15876 Interpreting nested CSS functions' "-" as minus and inserting a space: https://github.com/prettier/prettier/issues/15369 https://github.com/prettier/prettier/issues/15369
  - deepfriedrice 3y ago
    1.1k open issues. OOF
    - berkes 3y ago
      I don't know enough about prettier. But in general linters (which have overlap with formatters but aren't the same) have a lot of issues that fall in the "this is not my preference. It must therefore be changed" category. "Gofmt's style is no one's favorite, yet gofmt is everyone's favorite." I guess.
    - mattrick 3y ago
      1.1k isn't bad for a project with ~33 million weekly downloads[1], imo. Yes, I know that's not necessarily a good metric, but it's ~10 million more than React[2] which also has a similar number of open issues[3]. [1]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/prettier https://www.npmjs.com/package/prettier [2]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/react https://www.npmjs.com/package/react [3]: https://github.com/facebook/react https://github.com/facebook/react
      - sph 3y ago
        A code formatter has no business having 1100 open issues (5k closed). It is not rocket science. In my experience, the number of open issues not only correlates with popularity, but how crappy the language is. Javascript projects, with its myriad of dependencies and attracting junior, inexperienced devs, tend to accumulate a great number of bugs. For reference, curl has 24 open issues (4k closed), it is a couple orders of magnitude more complex AND more used than prettier.
    - xrisk 3y ago
      Is that because they don’t use a bot to auto-close issues like a lot of other projects?
      - withinboredom 3y ago
        That annoys the crap out of me. Closing stale issues doesn’t make the issues go away, it just means that edge cases aren’t addressed. If I have an issue and find myself in a stale-closed issue, I’m not even going to bother reporting it. I’m either going to look for a different library altogether, one that actually tries to solve edge cases; or I’m going to create my own library as a big middle-finger to the project. At work, I’ll just open a new issue, which will probably just be ignored.
- haburka 3y ago
  I don’t want to post a specific issue without doxxing myself but you can browse through the open issues on GitHub to find some. Some are years old! I think the more popular languages tend to be better supported so you probably don’t know about it but prettier is a massive monolith with support for many languages and use cases. Sometimes there are bugs that mangle code
nindalf 3y ago
Yeah I think having motivated and paid maintainers helps a lot. If maintaining the repo is the responsibility of a team that’s working 9 to 5, it’s much more likely that it’s going to succeed. Such a project avoids most of the pitfalls that are faced by individual open source developers coding in their spare time - lack of funding, appreciation, time, help etc. If one person in the team wants to move on, the company will find another person to take their place. That’s possibly why React and Go and Prettier continue to flourish. While the maintainers have had a lot of hard technical problems to solve, they didn’t need to worry about making rent or burning their weekends triaging issues instead of spending time with family. Many of the original authors are no longer working on the projects, but they’ve been replaced by other Google and Meta employees. This had a bigger impact than basing Go on a paper written by a Haskeller. All this to say - if you’re depending on open source you need to fund it directly. Dont expect that FAANG will forever, or there will be a magic wand like a research paper that makes it automatically easier to maintain.

goodoldneon 3y ago

What’s an example of Prettier breaking code?

wildpeaks 3y ago
Another example: https://github.com/prettier/prettier/issues/187 https://github.com/prettier/prettier/issues/187 That issue has been open for 7 years.
- w23j 3y ago
  The removal of the parentheses does not change the behavior of the program. I guess that would not be considered "breaking" the code.
- Gianna12 3y ago
  [flagged]
blopker 3y ago
The biggest issue I run in to is with Django HTML. It's unusable. They know about it and they said they won't fix it.
exac 3y ago
For example, the latest Prettier makes XHTML files invalid by changing DOCTYPE to lowercase: https://github.com/prettier/prettier/issues/15476 https://github.com/prettier/prettier/issues/15476 Prettier moves ts-ignore comments which can cause TypeScript errors: https://github.com/prettier/prettier/issues/15876 https://github.com/prettier/prettier/issues/15876 Interpreting nested CSS functions' "-" as minus and inserting a space: https://github.com/prettier/prettier/issues/15369 https://github.com/prettier/prettier/issues/15369
- deepfriedrice 3y ago
  1.1k open issues. OOF
  - berkes 3y ago
    I don't know enough about prettier. But in general linters (which have overlap with formatters but aren't the same) have a lot of issues that fall in the "this is not my preference. It must therefore be changed" category. "Gofmt's style is no one's favorite, yet gofmt is everyone's favorite." I guess.
  - mattrick 3y ago
    1.1k isn't bad for a project with ~33 million weekly downloads[1], imo. Yes, I know that's not necessarily a good metric, but it's ~10 million more than React[2] which also has a similar number of open issues[3]. [1]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/prettier https://www.npmjs.com/package/prettier [2]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/react https://www.npmjs.com/package/react [3]: https://github.com/facebook/react https://github.com/facebook/react
    - sph 3y ago
      A code formatter has no business having 1100 open issues (5k closed). It is not rocket science. In my experience, the number of open issues not only correlates with popularity, but how crappy the language is. Javascript projects, with its myriad of dependencies and attracting junior, inexperienced devs, tend to accumulate a great number of bugs. For reference, curl has 24 open issues (4k closed), it is a couple orders of magnitude more complex AND more used than prettier.
  - xrisk 3y ago
    Is that because they don’t use a bot to auto-close issues like a lot of other projects?
    - withinboredom 3y ago
      That annoys the crap out of me. Closing stale issues doesn’t make the issues go away, it just means that edge cases aren’t addressed. If I have an issue and find myself in a stale-closed issue, I’m not even going to bother reporting it. I’m either going to look for a different library altogether, one that actually tries to solve edge cases; or I’m going to create my own library as a big middle-finger to the project. At work, I’ll just open a new issue, which will probably just be ignored.
haburka 3y ago
I don’t want to post a specific issue without doxxing myself but you can browse through the open issues on GitHub to find some. Some are years old! I think the more popular languages tend to be better supported so you probably don’t know about it but prettier is a massive monolith with support for many languages and use cases. Sometimes there are bugs that mangle code

nindalf 3y ago

Yeah I think having motivated and paid maintainers helps a lot. If maintaining the repo is the responsibility of a team that’s working 9 to 5, it’s much more likely that it’s going to succeed. Such a project avoids most of the pitfalls that are faced by individual open source developers coding in their spare time - lack of funding, appreciation, time, help etc. If one person in the team wants to move on, the company will find another person to take their place. That’s possibly why React and Go and Prettier continue to flourish. While the maintainers have had a lot of hard technical problems to solve, they didn’t need to worry about making rent or burning their weekends triaging issues instead of spending time with family. Many of the original authors are no longer working on the projects, but they’ve been replaced by other Google and Meta employees. This had a bigger impact than basing Go on a paper written by a Haskeller. All this to say - if you’re depending on open source you need to fund it directly. Dont expect that FAANG will forever, or there will be a magic wand like a research paper that makes it automatically easier to maintain.