4 ms·

Meh, people seem to have an inflated view of Prettier. I find that it's at best ok, but has produced enough frustrating errors that I just turn it off.

pjerem 3y ago
Prettier real usefulness is in team projects. At $PREVIOUS_WORKPLACE, it totally removed the burden of formatting issues in PRs. It’s far from perfect but at least everyone in the team was producing the same style and we could focus on logic errors rather than formatting (which is the first thing you spot and can’t ignore when doing a code review).
- brailsafe 3y ago
  Formatting errors are at best an incidental detail that nobody should be wasting time on regardless of where it pops up; if prettier helps, great, but in its absence, I don't believe a trivial formatting inconsistency should illicit more than a tiny note among other problems you'd ask to be fixed. If the formatting errors are so frequent and so glaring as to warrant a negative review on that basis alone, such that you feel a mediator is required, then I'd wager Prettier may be obscuring other communication deficiencies. That said, I do believe in the value of consistent formatting tools, I just think Prettier is a somewhat lazy choice that attempts to skirt responsibility for deciding on things or cultivating agreement. It's a disfunctional team who's members care too much about their opinions on such trite topics, and/or who aren't capable of coming to agreement on a common set of them. For PRs, I've always just asked someone to run their formatter if it's clear they forgot, and usually there's a common config used by some formatting tool, it's not worth much beyond a a one-liner to make these decisions, and you should be able to do this periodically as things change.
ravenstine 3y ago
Formatting is extremely overrated. It's important, don't get me wrong, but developers today seem to have this fetish for having a bunch of formatting rules on top of a litany of linter rules, as if the number of problems solved scales linearly with the amount of guard rails added. A level of it is useful, but so much of it is a waste of time and can lead to idiotic situations where things conflict or override one another. Not to mention time wasted bikeshedding this stuff. Prettier, to me, is about as average as these tools come. It's not particularly offensive, though I don't understand why it's not way faster than it is.

pjerem 3y ago

Prettier real usefulness is in team projects. At $PREVIOUS_WORKPLACE, it totally removed the burden of formatting issues in PRs. It’s far from perfect but at least everyone in the team was producing the same style and we could focus on logic errors rather than formatting (which is the first thing you spot and can’t ignore when doing a code review).

brailsafe 3y ago
Formatting errors are at best an incidental detail that nobody should be wasting time on regardless of where it pops up; if prettier helps, great, but in its absence, I don't believe a trivial formatting inconsistency should illicit more than a tiny note among other problems you'd ask to be fixed. If the formatting errors are so frequent and so glaring as to warrant a negative review on that basis alone, such that you feel a mediator is required, then I'd wager Prettier may be obscuring other communication deficiencies. That said, I do believe in the value of consistent formatting tools, I just think Prettier is a somewhat lazy choice that attempts to skirt responsibility for deciding on things or cultivating agreement. It's a disfunctional team who's members care too much about their opinions on such trite topics, and/or who aren't capable of coming to agreement on a common set of them. For PRs, I've always just asked someone to run their formatter if it's clear they forgot, and usually there's a common config used by some formatting tool, it's not worth much beyond a a one-liner to make these decisions, and you should be able to do this periodically as things change.

ravenstine 3y ago

Formatting is extremely overrated. It's important, don't get me wrong, but developers today seem to have this fetish for having a bunch of formatting rules on top of a litany of linter rules, as if the number of problems solved scales linearly with the amount of guard rails added. A level of it is useful, but so much of it is a waste of time and can lead to idiotic situations where things conflict or override one another. Not to mention time wasted bikeshedding this stuff. Prettier, to me, is about as average as these tools come. It's not particularly offensive, though I don't understand why it's not way faster than it is.