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I’ll go a step further. I’ve never understood why people care so much about the linter. Just let people write code and don’t worry about the linter. I don’t ne

I’ll go a step further. I’ve never understood why people care so much about the linter. Just let people write code and don’t worry about the linter. I don’t need to fight a linter which makes my code worse when I could just write it in a way that doesn’t suck. I promise it’ll be fine. I’m too busy doing actual software engineering to care if code is not perfectly formatted to some arbitrary style specification. I feel like style lingers are horseshoe theory. Use them enough and eventually you wrap back around to just living without them.

pletnes 1y ago
Some linters find issues you care about. Forgotten print statements or confusing indentations come to mind. I’ve worked with people who easily forget, and I’m one of them myself.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
jwilber 1y ago
But what’s the issue? Setting lint rules is one and done - running pre-commit can be made automatic?
skinner927 1y ago
The point of linters is so the code looks the same regardless of who wrote it. This way it’s easier to read. Some people have horrible style and linters really help. I find linters make me faster. Sometimes I’m feeling lazy and I just want to pump out a bunch of lines of ugly code with mappings poorly formatted, bad indents, and just have it all synched up when I save.
- carlosjobim 1y ago
  I see no reason to accommodate to worthless programmers who aren't able to read or format the code that's sent to them. They can lint it themselves if they want.
  - mindwok 1y ago
    It's not about accomodating people, it's about consistency in codebases when many people with different preferences or styles are working on it. You just eliminate the cognitive overhead so people can develop intuition about how the code works and flows.
    - carlosjobim 1y ago
      Good, let huge companies do that. Now this lint madness is pushed onto everybody who wants to program, including individual hobbyists. And many of them are trying to learn coding and get their compiling sabotaged by the linter, not knowing it's something they can opt out of.
raincole 1y ago
People like you are the exact reason why linter is a thing.
- forrestthewoods 1y ago
  Don’t be rude. I write perfectly legible code. More legible than a linter infact. Because the rules for what is ideal are not so simple as to be encoded in simple lint rules. Sure it gets like 95%. But the last 5% is so bad it ruins the positives. If your goal is “code that is easy to read and understand” then a linter is only maybe the first 20%. Lots of well linted code is thoroughly inscrutable.
  - stavros 1y ago
    I disagree. It gets you 95%, and do you know how many people are better than that? One in twenty. I'll gladly pay the price of making the one person's code worse if it improves the other nineteen's.
  - raincole 1y ago
    > I write perfectly legible code I 100% believe you. And for god's sake please use linter. British and American spelling are both 100% legible English. But when multiple people coauthor a book, they should stick to one instead of letting each author use their favorite spelling.
  - genericspammer 1y ago
    Im sure you write very readable code, but in most companies, there are a bunch of devs who completely rape the codebase with unintelligble bullshit. The linter is the first line of defense against these bozos, unfortunately it must be enforced company wide.
ngruhn 1y ago
Why is this flagged? I completely agree. 99% the linter is not enforcing correctness in my experience. It's just enforcing a bunch of subjective aesthetic constraints. Which import order, max number of empty lines between statement, what type of string literal to use, no trailing white space, etc. A non trivial part of my day is spent dealing with this giant catalog of dinner etiquette. Not all of it is auto fixable. Also, there are plenty of situations where everyone would agree that violating the rule is necessary (eg. "no use before define" but you need mutual recursion). Also sometimes rules are circularly in conflict (eg you have to change a line but there is no way to do it without violating the max-line-length rule).
- MrJohz 1y ago
  If your linter is enforcing subjective aesthetic constraints, then I'd argue it's not really a linter but a formatter at that point, and it should be automatically fixing all that stuff for you rather than have you do that manually. Things like import order, empty lines, white space etc can all be fixed automatically in most languages I've worked with. Linters enforcing rules that need to be broken is a pet peeve of mine, and I agree with you there. Most linters allow for using comments to explicitly exclude certain lines from being linted. This should ~never be necessary. If it is regularly necessary, then either you're programming bad (always a possibility!) or the rule has too many false positives and you should remove it.
- komali2 1y ago
  Does your linter not have a fix command for things like import order? Does your editor not auto trim white space? To be frank, everyone I've worked with that complained about the linter didn't know much about their tooling. They didn't know about the fix command (even though I put it in the readme and told them about it), they didn't know how to turn on lintfix and prettier on save, wouldn't switch on git hooks and didn't know their lint failed until GitHub said so, and none of the people like this were so productive that it made up for this trait.
maratc 1y ago
Agree. There's a python linter named `black` and it converts my code: important_numbers = { "x": 3, "y": 42, # Answer to the Ultimate Question! "z": 2 } into this: important_numbers = {"x": 3, "y": 42, "z": 2} # Answer to the Ultimate Question! This `black` is non-configurable (because it's "opinionated") and yet, out of some strange cargo cult, people swear by it and try to impose it on everybody.
- iainmerrick 1y ago
  This is the flip side of "I’ve never understood why people care so much about the linter"! Why are you caring about formatting? Just write your code, get it working, let Black tidy it up in the standard way. Don't worry about the formatting. In cases where you're annoyed about some choice the formatter makes, somebody else would be equally annoyed by the choice you would rather make. There is no perfect solution. The whole point is to have a reasonable, plausible default, and to automate it so that nobody has to spend any time thinking about it whatsoever. Running a standard formatter when code is checked in minimizes the source control churn due to re-formatting. That churn is a pointless waste of time. If you don't run a standard formatter, I guarantee that badly-formatted code will make it into source control, and that's annoying.
  - maratc 1y ago
    I may be unusual in a way I treat my profession and care about my professional output (the code I write), and I take both very seriously. There's a quote from Steve Jobs (or maybe his carpenter father): “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.” When you say "Don't worry about the formatting", what you're saying is "use a piece of plywood on the back," and I'm just not going to do that.
    - iainmerrick 1y ago
thfuran 1y ago
Everyone has their own opinion of what format doesn’t suck, so without a consistent code format, you’ll have to review diffs where fights over white space are mixed in with the meaningful change.
tacitusarc 1y ago
That may be true for you, but I have worked with plenty of devs who cannot even be consistent with naming conventions in a function, let alone throughout the application. Don’t get me wrong: modern liners often annoy me and devs who spend a lot of time fiddling with those settings tend not to be very good programmers. But sometimes having guardrails is necessary.

pletnes 1y ago

Some linters find issues you care about. Forgotten print statements or confusing indentations come to mind. I’ve worked with people who easily forget, and I’m one of them myself.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

jwilber 1y ago

But what’s the issue? Setting lint rules is one and done - running pre-commit can be made automatic?

skinner927 1y ago

The point of linters is so the code looks the same regardless of who wrote it. This way it’s easier to read. Some people have horrible style and linters really help. I find linters make me faster. Sometimes I’m feeling lazy and I just want to pump out a bunch of lines of ugly code with mappings poorly formatted, bad indents, and just have it all synched up when I save.

carlosjobim 1y ago
I see no reason to accommodate to worthless programmers who aren't able to read or format the code that's sent to them. They can lint it themselves if they want.
- mindwok 1y ago
  It's not about accomodating people, it's about consistency in codebases when many people with different preferences or styles are working on it. You just eliminate the cognitive overhead so people can develop intuition about how the code works and flows.
  - carlosjobim 1y ago
    Good, let huge companies do that. Now this lint madness is pushed onto everybody who wants to program, including individual hobbyists. And many of them are trying to learn coding and get their compiling sabotaged by the linter, not knowing it's something they can opt out of.

raincole 1y ago

People like you are the exact reason why linter is a thing.

forrestthewoods 1y ago
Don’t be rude. I write perfectly legible code. More legible than a linter infact. Because the rules for what is ideal are not so simple as to be encoded in simple lint rules. Sure it gets like 95%. But the last 5% is so bad it ruins the positives. If your goal is “code that is easy to read and understand” then a linter is only maybe the first 20%. Lots of well linted code is thoroughly inscrutable.
- stavros 1y ago
  I disagree. It gets you 95%, and do you know how many people are better than that? One in twenty. I'll gladly pay the price of making the one person's code worse if it improves the other nineteen's.
- raincole 1y ago
  > I write perfectly legible code I 100% believe you. And for god's sake please use linter. British and American spelling are both 100% legible English. But when multiple people coauthor a book, they should stick to one instead of letting each author use their favorite spelling.
- genericspammer 1y ago
  Im sure you write very readable code, but in most companies, there are a bunch of devs who completely rape the codebase with unintelligble bullshit. The linter is the first line of defense against these bozos, unfortunately it must be enforced company wide.

ngruhn 1y ago

Why is this flagged? I completely agree. 99% the linter is not enforcing correctness in my experience. It's just enforcing a bunch of subjective aesthetic constraints. Which import order, max number of empty lines between statement, what type of string literal to use, no trailing white space, etc. A non trivial part of my day is spent dealing with this giant catalog of dinner etiquette. Not all of it is auto fixable. Also, there are plenty of situations where everyone would agree that violating the rule is necessary (eg. "no use before define" but you need mutual recursion). Also sometimes rules are circularly in conflict (eg you have to change a line but there is no way to do it without violating the max-line-length rule).

MrJohz 1y ago
If your linter is enforcing subjective aesthetic constraints, then I'd argue it's not really a linter but a formatter at that point, and it should be automatically fixing all that stuff for you rather than have you do that manually. Things like import order, empty lines, white space etc can all be fixed automatically in most languages I've worked with. Linters enforcing rules that need to be broken is a pet peeve of mine, and I agree with you there. Most linters allow for using comments to explicitly exclude certain lines from being linted. This should ~never be necessary. If it is regularly necessary, then either you're programming bad (always a possibility!) or the rule has too many false positives and you should remove it.
komali2 1y ago
Does your linter not have a fix command for things like import order? Does your editor not auto trim white space? To be frank, everyone I've worked with that complained about the linter didn't know much about their tooling. They didn't know about the fix command (even though I put it in the readme and told them about it), they didn't know how to turn on lintfix and prettier on save, wouldn't switch on git hooks and didn't know their lint failed until GitHub said so, and none of the people like this were so productive that it made up for this trait.

maratc 1y ago

Agree. There's a python linter named `black` and it converts my code: important_numbers = { "x": 3, "y": 42, # Answer to the Ultimate Question! "z": 2 } into this: important_numbers = {"x": 3, "y": 42, "z": 2} # Answer to the Ultimate Question! This `black` is non-configurable (because it's "opinionated") and yet, out of some strange cargo cult, people swear by it and try to impose it on everybody.

iainmerrick 1y ago
This is the flip side of "I’ve never understood why people care so much about the linter"! Why are you caring about formatting? Just write your code, get it working, let Black tidy it up in the standard way. Don't worry about the formatting. In cases where you're annoyed about some choice the formatter makes, somebody else would be equally annoyed by the choice you would rather make. There is no perfect solution. The whole point is to have a reasonable, plausible default, and to automate it so that nobody has to spend any time thinking about it whatsoever. Running a standard formatter when code is checked in minimizes the source control churn due to re-formatting. That churn is a pointless waste of time. If you don't run a standard formatter, I guarantee that badly-formatted code will make it into source control, and that's annoying.
- maratc 1y ago
  I may be unusual in a way I treat my profession and care about my professional output (the code I write), and I take both very seriously. There's a quote from Steve Jobs (or maybe his carpenter father): “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.” When you say "Don't worry about the formatting", what you're saying is "use a piece of plywood on the back," and I'm just not going to do that.
  - iainmerrick 1y ago

thfuran 1y ago

Everyone has their own opinion of what format doesn’t suck, so without a consistent code format, you’ll have to review diffs where fights over white space are mixed in with the meaningful change.

tacitusarc 1y ago

That may be true for you, but I have worked with plenty of devs who cannot even be consistent with naming conventions in a function, let alone throughout the application. Don’t get me wrong: modern liners often annoy me and devs who spend a lot of time fiddling with those settings tend not to be very good programmers. But sometimes having guardrails is necessary.