> This is why I love things like cargo fmt / go fmt / eslint / etc.
I agree. Once I had the displeasure of working with a junior dev who was very prolific in posting comments on style and if a space should be at the left or at the right of a symbol. It took me a few days of dealing with that noise to onboard a linter.
Even so the junior dev felt entitled to manifest how high their standards were by posting a torrent of comments in the PR that onboarded the team's official linter config.
But once the PR was approved and merged, surprise surprise: the junior dev's PR comment metrics dropped from dozens per PR to zero. The style guide didn't even had to be enforced.
The last I've heard about the junior dev was throwing a tantrum when one of their PRs received a comment from another team member asking to run the linter because it failed to adhere to the team's official style guide. Apparently the high standards and this attention to detail only went one way.
That’s why you hook the linter up so it runs on every commit / push. No need to ask, it always runs. And no need to quibble over style. Don’t like it? Change the linter.
I agree that it should be hooked up to run as a precommit hook, but unfortunately that doesn’t always solve things. People can- and do- bypass precommit hooks. It happens all the time at my company with certain teams, but I’ve been unable to figure out why. Any precommit hook that should run- needs a correlating required PR action to verify any precommit expectations are met. Otherwise, people reviewing the PRs just assume it ran and the people bypassing it get away with it.
Install pre-commit with various linters for all the languages and data files out there, and the problem is solved. I do it even for Makefile's and cmake.
That's also why I dislike it: The mind that will go apeshit over trivial style nonsense will still provide unhelpful feedback on other topics... but it will become far less obvious that their comments should be downgraded.
Formatters also do a poor job if your language is flexible and expressive. Great for go, but if your language is the kind that easily supports internal DSLs, formatters are not even helpful at making the code regular
What's your definition of "trivial style nonsense"? Is it "something I personally don't understand or care"?
Things like tabs vs spaces is important, and so is how many spaces an indentation level should take. This affects how editors reformat code, how other people's editors present the code, and even how many lines a commit has and is blamed for a change.
That's why linters are of critical importance to a team, and so is adopting a shared standard and editor config.
The only people who don't understand the importance of a style guide and how to make it a non-issue by enforcing tools to enforce it are those with little to no experience working with software.
Linting and style guides are not of "critical importance". No business objective will go unachieved because some checkins use tabs and others use spaces.
Whatever problem style issues might cause can be resolved before lunch by running a formatter and committing the result.
> Linting and style guides are not of "critical importance".
This is simply false, as attested by the huge volume of comments in this thread by those with actual professional experience working on real-world software projects.
You're also oblivious to the problem ___domain, because otherwise you'd understand that the critical problems are not whether a space should be at the left or at the right of a symbol, but all the churn that is required to manually address style problems in PRs.
Try to think about the problem. You post a PR that screws up all formatting. It takes time for a team member to review a PR. Once you start to get reviews,you notice comments pointing out failures in complying with a specific style. Whether you go the passive-aggressive path of waiting for any other team member to review your code or you do the right thing and fix the problems you introduced, that requires another round of PR reviews. The time that you take with each iteration is the time your work is delayed to be merged. Now think about how many hours per month you waste just because you can't manage to format your code properly.
I’m not sure if I’m understanding you correctly, but how on earth would a pull request even make it to the review state if it fails to lint in the pipeline?
I sort of agree with GP in that the discussions are a waste of time. I also agree with you that you should simply automate it through tools. Styling doesn’t have to be a democracy or about personal preference, all styles work, it’s all about picking one and then forcing everyone to use it. Of course you do it in a much more involving process than what I make it sound like here, but ultimately someone with decision making powers is going to have to lock down the process so no further time is wasted on it.
Only one place I have worked at had the goal of writing code as if it were from just one person and it was pretty nice, honestly. The diff tool output was easy to understand (not a lot of noise). What made it work was everyone was pretty mature and understood that this was a group effort, and not everyone was going to get their personal itch scratched around brace style, etc.
We did have some outside contractors who didn't get it at first, but after several of their submissions were rejected (with potential financial penalties) they got onboard and followed the guidelines we had sent them. "These people mean it."
> it will become far less obvious that their comments should be downgraded.
I'm curious why you think this would happen... I would imagine that their comments will now have be to about things that matter, and if they are unhelpful they will stand out more.
It is obvious that a style comment is of no significance, and that the person who made it chose to spend time and personal capital on something of no significance.
It is not obvious that an actual code change is of poor quality.
To show that takes infinitely more experience, work to analyse all the direct and indirect ramifications of both the original and proposed approaches, capacity to push back and decide that your own engineering judgement is equal or better than whoever is purporting to correct you, willingness to suffer everyone else accusing you of arrogance for that on top.
Even with all of that, it's a lot harder to prove the valueless comment is valueless because the more you know, the more you know that practically every single line of code could be done 30 other ways with some valid argument for each one.
It's completely insidious both for the junior and the senior.
The junior has no way to know the junk comment is junk. So they internalize the comment and everyone is worse for it.
The senior has it almost worse. They know enough to know they don't know everything and the comment might be valid, so they put in all kinds of work to try to figure out if they actually missed something, did they have point etc. Maybe in the end the code doesn't end up as bad as the junior just rolling over, but it sucked for everyone and the challenge was not really an intentional productive crucible, it was just a douche that everyone had to waste time and energy taking seriously.
Only someone who actually is arrogant (whatever level, whichever side of the pr) has it easy. Again bad for everyone except them maybe.
If the seniors are too passive to say no faster and faster, and management is absent, the junior’s going to end up being the tech lead. I’ve seen this. :)
It’s not necessarily even bad if there is no meaningful leadership above or alongside the junior. The fast-rising junior may end up hiring developers who are more assertive and still capable.
I don't particularly care which one you choose - although I admit to having a preference - but I want that style consistently applied throughout the project, so I'm not stumbling over stylistic differences as I'm scrolling through code trying to investigate something.
And keep in mind that this particular example, that some people can read clearly, is just five lines. When you're looking at a 3k line file, one of the dozen you're digging through during an outage, that shit matters.
You need to work with code from multitude of sources, then you will learn how to read code efficiently. And how futile are your dreams about styles. We are not supermodels and fasion designers, far from it, get over it!
Of course you can, it's a tiny, isolated example consisting of 5 or so tokens. That's not how real programs look like so you cannot take the example so literally.
The second form is superior for at least three reasons:
1. Enables a property corollary to the happy path rule, which is that every return statement of a function is at the beginning of a line. This property is crucially important for readability, it makes it reliably possible to determine every exit point of a function by merely scanning the left hand vertical slice of it as opposed to needing our eyes to jump around erratically searching for arbitrarily placed returns.
2. Uniformity: mixing different if statement styles in a single codebase interferes with our ability to match visual patterns. Since we can no longer rely on every if statement looking the same, we cannot quickly skim over code anymore.
3. Refactorability: it's easier to add another line of code to the if statement if there's no need to also add brackets.
Bugs. Subtle horrible bugs that can take forever to find. Not having the braces makes it so easy to accidentally break in later changes or refactoring. Sure on its own it's super obvious, but next to other changes or refactoring it is really easy to miss that suddenly logic falls out of the condition or doesn't make sense anymore.
I don't remember the details but I've had some typo in a one-line-if-condition once and it took me days to find it. Might have been an accidental semicolon in C. A linter enforced the braces and line-breaks and made it obvious.
Anyways, running a linter also helps because all anger or frustration can be directed towards the machine.
> Not having the braces makes it so easy to accidentally break in later changes or refactoring.
Did you mean “not having a linter”? Because once you have a linter you no longer need the braces because the autoformatting will always fix the indentation.
Perfectly valid and people do it. But then later on someone might put a debug statement above the return to check something. Or add some other logic.
if (foo)
doSomething();
return;
And suddenly the logic is broken and the return falls out of the if-condition. It looks fairly contrived with an example like this but easy to do when code is a bit more complicated or people are tired or rushed. It's a good habit to always enforce braces for if-conditions as it defeats that whole category of mistakes. Fairly innocent but can be so hard to find because of that.
A linter would enforce having braces and solve the issue. And for codebases without a linter it is a good habit to just go with the braces.
I think you misread what I wrote. Your example could be fixed by braces, but it can equally well be fixed by just automatically fixing the incorrect indentation. Visual Studio has been doing this for a decade already. It's really not rocket science.
The trouble is with those rush code out without really looking what they are doing. They make those mistakes, very easily, indeed.
No style could save us from those devils!
People should take the necessary attention to make quality work (and use proper techniques, where proper does not entail style or other visuals or appearances, not at all. That's for superficious persons). This is true for any part of life not just coding.
No discussions of whether
is valid, or we should do