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This is one of my most loathed developments in "best practices" lately. I see it everywhere and it just adds noise, since it doesn't change the functionality o

This is one of my most loathed developments in "best practices" lately. I see it everywhere and it just adds noise, since it doesn't change the functionality of the code. It's like adding a comment on every flow control statement. A concrete example is try/catch, which forces the user to add superfluous curly brackets. In fairness, I have hit the "goto" style of bug he talks about in switch commands, when I forgot to add a break statement. But I can't remember a single time in my programming career when I added a line to an if/for/while and broke something. I think people are wasting their energies on subjective topics like telling people to use spaces instead of tabs, or putting { on the same line as the flow control statement, or even telling people how much whitespace to use between () and where. What we really need is a standardized formatter for any language that works like Google's Go Format. Programmers should not be spending time refactoring code just for looks. If anyone knows of a utility that does this and is easily configurable for personal taste, I would sure appreciate it. Being able to convert /* */ comments to // and back again would be a plus.

nostrademons 13y ago
Formatters are usually language-specific, and there are formatters for most popular languages. See eg. clang-format [1] for C/C++, your IDE's reformat command for Java [2][3], PythonTidy [4] or AutoPep8 [5] for Python, or jsbeautifier [6], JSPretty [7], or Aptana [8] for JS. [1] http://clang.llvm.org/docs/ClangFormat.html http://clang.llvm.org/docs/ClangFormat.html [2] http://help.eclipse.org/kepler/index.jsp?topic=%2Forg.eclipse.jdt.doc.user%2Freference%2Fpreferences%2Fjava%2Fcodestyle%2Fref-preferences-formatter.htm http://help.eclipse.org/kepler/index.jsp?topic=%2Forg.eclips... [3] https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/webhelp/reformatting-source-code.html https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/webhelp/reformatting-source-c... [4] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/PythonTidy/1.22 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/PythonTidy/1.22 [5] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/autopep8/ https://pypi.python.org/pypi/autopep8/ [6] http://jsbeautifier.org/ http://jsbeautifier.org/ [7] http://www.jspretty.com/ http://www.jspretty.com/ [8] http://www.aptana.com/products/studio3 http://www.aptana.com/products/studio3
benihana 13y ago
>I see it everywhere and it just adds noise, since it doesn't change the functionality of the code. I'm confused. It sounds like you're saying if (condition) { stuff(); other_stuff(); } is the same as if (condition) stuff(); other_stuff(); because the brackets don't change the functionality, but they do. I might be misreading what you're saying though.
- detrino 13y ago
  What he was saying should be obvious, since there is actual code in the comment he was replying to, and its not what you wrote.

nostrademons 13y ago

Formatters are usually language-specific, and there are formatters for most popular languages. See eg. clang-format [1] for C/C++, your IDE's reformat command for Java [2][3], PythonTidy [4] or AutoPep8 [5] for Python, or jsbeautifier [6], JSPretty [7], or Aptana [8] for JS. [1] http://clang.llvm.org/docs/ClangFormat.html http://clang.llvm.org/docs/ClangFormat.html [2] http://help.eclipse.org/kepler/index.jsp?topic=%2Forg.eclipse.jdt.doc.user%2Freference%2Fpreferences%2Fjava%2Fcodestyle%2Fref-preferences-formatter.htm http://help.eclipse.org/kepler/index.jsp?topic=%2Forg.eclips... [3] https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/webhelp/reformatting-source-code.html https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/webhelp/reformatting-source-c... [4] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/PythonTidy/1.22 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/PythonTidy/1.22 [5] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/autopep8/ https://pypi.python.org/pypi/autopep8/ [6] http://jsbeautifier.org/ http://jsbeautifier.org/ [7] http://www.jspretty.com/ http://www.jspretty.com/ [8] http://www.aptana.com/products/studio3 http://www.aptana.com/products/studio3

benihana 13y ago

>I see it everywhere and it just adds noise, since it doesn't change the functionality of the code. I'm confused. It sounds like you're saying if (condition) { stuff(); other_stuff(); } is the same as if (condition) stuff(); other_stuff(); because the brackets don't change the functionality, but they do. I might be misreading what you're saying though.

detrino 13y ago
What he was saying should be obvious, since there is actual code in the comment he was replying to, and its not what you wrote.