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jeremy_wiebe

I feel like Prettier does a really good job with JavaScript.

What situations have you found where automated formatting doesn’t suffice or has these limits?

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Ordering code.

Some tools order/deduplicate imports. Prettier does not. [1]

And no tool that I've seen orders fields/constructor/method, etc.

[1] https://github.com/prettier/prettier/issues/949

Interesting, yeah, that’s definitely missing. ESLint has rules for ordering, feels like it’d be a relatively simple addition to prettier.

In JavaScript, imports sometimes (too often, really) have side effects. I don't know if it makes sense for prettier to do that, at least by default.

In my experience, side-effecting imports are fairly uncommon.

But in any cases, all formatters allow you to selectively disable it for certain liners.

Hopefully uncommon, anyways. Imports with side effects sounds like a nightmare to debug.

I don't have a problem with anything that discourages imports with side effects. You can always ignore[0] any cases where this happens.

[0] https://prettier.io/docs/en/ignore.html

eslint and prettier are not mutually exclusive

I didn’t mean to imply that. In fact we use eslint + prettier where I work.

> it’d be a relatively simple addition to prettier.

It would be, but as you can see in the linked issue, it was closed for being a non-goal. So, it's not likely to change.

(Prettier generally keeps the AST identical; i.e. whitespace and parentheses changes only.)

I don't know if it supports JavaScript but Resharper does this for .Net

I think all three major Java IDEs do this as well.

Humans format with rules that take into account semantic information, symmetry, and aesthetics. They know that a function call that gives the entries of a matrix is formatted as a grid for a reason even when the auto-formatter could fit it on one line. They know that that arm of the match that would be formatted weird if it were on its own is actually formatted well because it exhibits that case's consistency with the other cases in the match. Probably the most important formatting decision they make is to, rather than format a long line, break it into intermediate results and store them in local variables given human-meaningful names.

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