3 ms·
One of my first jobs was a small software company writing software for a small number of clients, in MS basic PDS. The lead developer didn't like to bother wit
by CrzyLngPwd 6mo ago
One of my first jobs was a small software company writing software for a small number of clients, in MS basic PDS.
The lead developer didn't like to bother with formatting code, so I wrote a tool called makenice to format his nasty spaghetti gibberish into something with good indents and layout to make it easier for us normal people to parse.
He was furious, literally spun in circles about it right in the office in front of everyone, so I wrote makenasty to format code into the way he appeared to like.
I only shared makenasty/nice with a couple of the team, who loved it, as it allowed easy conversion between something readable and something the team lead like.
He never knew about makenasty.
- munk-a 6mo agoOutside of the naming - this is a perfectly sane thing to do for developer comfort and can usually be accomplished with simple transformations. There are often limitations (like manually added indentation/spacing for alignment) but as long as you're very intentional about what changes you'll allow and have a good understanding of the language it can be an extremely safe operation.
- e28eta 6mo agoI think git’s naming is actually pretty reasonable: smudge (on checkout) & clean (on stage).
- munk-a 6mo agoOh smudge and clean are excellent names. My singly held objection to the OP was that they called one of the scripts "makenasty" instead of like "makemunkastyle" or something more neutral. I think it's an excellent idea I'd just avoid being judgemental in naming. You can consider my deep love of BSD braces super nasty but I'd prefer you didn't label it that way.
- nitwit005 6mo agoIf he didn't bother formatting code, it would seem impossible to create a tool that formatted code the way he preferred.
- singpolyma3 6mo agoSounds like he did format code, and even had opinions on how it should be formatted, but OP disagreed.
- Terr_ 6mo agoI find a lot of these conflicts I can't resolve when everybody agrees that the pain of ugly/unnecessary diffs is greater than the pain of minor formatting disagreements.
- mistrial9 6mo agoits because some people learned to put meaning into different ways to layout dense expressions, or different kinds of comments in difference contexts. python was "weird" at first to C-tribe, because of the strict layout used to eliminate some of the syntax tokens. These stories come from a time before "order over all" in some factory code base was seen as Universally a virtue of some kind
- ethical_source 6mo agoThis kind of passive-aggressive bullshit is exactly what's wrong with tech. People don't decide things: they just passively resist, and authority ends up being a muddle of truncated information flows.
- wutwutwat 6mo agoIf someone sharing an old war story with what I felt was a positive and joking tone triggered you this bad, I feel bad for anyone working with you. Nothing in tech is worth going through life miserable. Nothing.
- brentcrude 6mo ago[dead]
- jameson 6mo agoreminds me of rob pike mentioning gofmt's style is "no one's favorite"
- ErroneousBosh 6mo agoHaving K&R brackets be a syntactical requirement and everything else is a syntax error is okay with me though.
- drob518 6mo agoK&R, ride or die.
- infogulch 6mo agoThe full quote: > Gofmt's style is no one's favorite, yet gofmt is everyone's favorite - Rob Pike https://go-proverbs.github.io/#:~:text=Gofmt%27s%20style%20is%20no%20one%27s%20favorite%2C%20yet%20gofmt%20is%20everyone%27s%20favorite. https://go-proverbs.github.io/#:~:text=Gofmt%27s%20style%20i... The best part about gofmt is there is no discussion about how to format Go code. The style itself is fine, skipping endless hours of pointless debate is priceless.