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Comment by tomc1985 | Hacker News Reader

tomc1985

I absolutely hate this kind of nitpicking, and am loathe to see it enforced, especially if the org has the bright idea to try to wire this up as a precommit hook.

Single quotes, double quotes, who cares? Oh no, you might have to change some extra characters. Such big cognitive overload, very hard...

All this 'standardization' is stripping the individuality and artistry from writing code. Sometimes I feel like the only person in the world who likes being able to look at code and know who wrote it by the style that they use.

In Ruby, especially, where expressiveness and being a little weird feature so prominently in our cultural heritage. If I wanted to be a conformist I'd write Javascript for a living!

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> I absolutely hate this kind of nitpicking, and am loathe to see it enforced, especially if the org has the bright idea to try to wire this up as a precommit hook.

I find this so strange. I also loathe nitpicking about syntax which is precisely why I think this would be a great tool!

I work in JS now on a large team and one of my least favorite activities is trying to find consensus on which linting rules we should/shouldn’t adopt. It’s such a waste of time!

Setup Prettier and never talk about style again.

(Linting is slightly different -- just use some sane eslint defaults and call it a day)

Another vote for prettier for JS/TS. The primary projects I work on we made some slight tweaks to the default style (wider line width) and though some people were unhappy about adopting a formatter, there have been zero beefs with prettier's actual output among an opinionated group.

Prettier has been the cause of most arguments about style for JS code I've been involved in recently. For starters, it tends to blow up diffs because you get above/below arbitrary limits and trigger a more extensive reformatting than necessary, and it's infuriating.

I find the argument that it will stop discussion of style bizarre, because it only shuts down discussions about style if you already have the power to tell people what the accepted style for your organisation is. In that case you don't need a tool that refuses to let you pick and choose, you just need the confidence to tell people you're not going to change things.

In other words: It's not Prettier that stops you from having discussions about style again, it's whether or not you signal to people that you're not willing to discuss it. To me, in that respect, a tool like this is a passive aggressive way of signalling that you're unwilling to discuss the subject without being willing to just say that you're not.

> I find this so strange. I also loathe nitpicking about syntax which is precisely why I think this would be a great tool!

The antidote to nitpicking isn't to force something where nitpicking isn't possible/already resolved, it's staying open-minded and flexible enough to not let the nitpicked things bother you. "There are many roads to Rome" and all that.

im guessing, but i assume this is more for industry, where they usually neither want nor appreciate individuality and artistry

(this isnt a criticism or anything, just my observation)

In industry, the prevailing code standards are almost certainly wildly divergent from any sort of Ruby "best practice".

In particular, if the goal is to have clear (and therefore somewhat more likely to be robust) code, you're going to see things like the use of single quotes to indicate "this will never be interpolated" or the use of explicit return statements even when "unnecessary" - both of which run afoul of these sorts of highly-opinionated and unconfigurable style enforcers.

There's not much artistry in being individualistic about trivial things such as '' vs "".

As long as a project I'm working on is being consistent about them, I'm good.

A team can and maybe should agree on a style, and enforce it, for sanity. That can be done while still allowing all the fun parts of writing Ruby.

This project tries to go much farther.

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