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Comment by xcambar | Hacker News Reader

In a team of engineers, find one that complains about the configuration formats or linting rules, and with 100% confidence, you know who will ruin your meetings.

Source: empirical study from me

Thanks for not being that person.

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The one that sent out the invitation

I'm that person and I don't ruin meetings. I find it's the opposite - there are one or two people that obstinately refuse to allow any improvements and derail meetings with endless naysaying and stuck-in-the-muddery. It's wearing.

Beware the cost of those improvements. I never want to have another discussion about whitespace layout.

I'll accept 2, 4, 8 spaces or tabs, but it should be consistent.

Here's my rule of thumb:

* for new projects, use a well-established, reputable standard

* for existing projects, use what is already in place if it is consistent

* in case of inconsistency, fix to the closest industry standard

My favorite:

* Use an auto-formatter and enforce it in CI

Yeah this is what I was trying to enact. They had sort of done that but the autoformatter had been broken for years and they wouldn't let me fix it and reformat everything.

Git supports revision ignore files for tools like git praise/blame, so that excuse that they don't want to reformat everything to avoid git praise blowout can be easily worked around by checking in an ignore revisions file and pointing them how to use it.

Github even has public beta support for it, though they require a specific name for the ignore revs file: https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/working-with-files/u...

Definitely, as long as it's consistent - I personally like to go for 4 spaces everywhere, I would say it makes the code look easy and readable.

Me, too, it's the default for almost every editor and code formatter. That makes it the most likely choice for projects.

But if this project made a weird decision I'm ok with it, as long as it's enforced consistently.

that's the thing, i wish yaml was just a config format, that it does other weird shit like calling functions is the problem

The article makes excellent points on this very topic.

I can't say that I've ever complained about any one of the rules; it's the constant churn of them that drives me insane.

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