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Comment by goldenkey | Hacker News Reader

Figures that Apple coders would cook something like this up. Seriously, stylistic habits..are habits. If you need a checker for them, they are no longer stylistic, they are significant, and you need to remember the patterns. This is cool but fruitless.

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You're entitled to your opinion, but code style checking is not something new and was most likely not cooked up by Apple coders. Checkstyle [1] is a Java code style tool and has been around since at least 2001.

[1] http://checkstyle.sourceforge.net/

I stand corrected. Thank you.

Checkstyle, FxCop, PEP 8 checkers. These tools have been around for ever, and normally tied into a CI environment.

Well I stand corrected. I code in Objective C myself but I never considered installing an XCode addon or adding a Git hook for simple things like spacing around method name or visibility scope. I guess it would help with large projects but it seems like a problem that is more in line with getting coders to be clean -- not so much an automated thing. Because an automated checker is not going to be able to unshitify messy methods.

Normally bad code is often caused by poor incentives, to get things done quickly, refactoring not appreciated, no unit tests, and managers not caring about good design. Most developers want good code, and it's a fight to get it.

These tools basically makes these things visible and harder to ignore.

But the tools would be much better when they get to reformatting and not just giving the programmer more work that is rather painstaking to do. (They are working on this feature, but are afraid of it)

I feel pretty similarly about this...and am an apple coder :D

If the tool reformatted however, I'd have a totally different feeling. That would be great, that it auto goes to some pre-determined, "ok" style for the team without wasting programmer effort doing it.

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