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Formatting code should be unnecessary

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Re: Formatting code should be unnecessary

#51

Post by mmastrac »

Buttons840 wrote: post #49
jsharpe wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. This idea comes up time and time again, but the cost/benefit just doesn't make sense at all. You're adding an unbelievable amount of complex tooling just to avoid running a simple formatter. The goal of having every developer viewing the code with their own preferences just isn't that important. On every team I've been on, we just use a standard style guide, enforced by formatter, and while not everyone agre…

> Arguing and obsessing about code formatting is simply useless bikeshedding. Unless it's an accessibility issue, and it is an accessibility issue sometimes.

Maybe if you use 16-wide tabs or a 40 character line length.

Re: Formatting code should be unnecessary

#52

Post by efortis »

Projectional Editing can be done with text sources.

Here’s an old video of JetBrains MPS rendering a table from code https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XolJx4GfMmg&t=63s

I’m hoping for an IDE able to render dictionaries as tables -- my wishlist doesn’t stop there.

Currently, we have a glimpse of those features, such as code folding, inlay hints, or docstrings rendered as HTML:

https://x.com/efortis/status/1922427544470438381

Re: Formatting code should be unnecessary

#53

Post by froh »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #2

The tradeoff here is not being able to use a universal set of tooling to interact with source files. Anything but text makes grep, diff, sed, and version control less effective. You end up locked into specialized tools, formats, or IDE extensions, while the Unix philosophy thrives on composability with plain text. There's a scissor that cuts through the formatting debate: If initial space width was configurable in th…

yes, contemporary editors and tools like treesitter have decided this debate in favor of plain text file representation, exactly for the reasons you give: universal accessibility by general purpose tools.

xslt was a Diana like pre-parsed representation of dsssl. oh how I miss dsssl (a scheme based sgml transformation language) but no. dsssl was a lisp! with hygienic macros! "ikes" they went and invented XSLT.

the "logic" escapes me to this day.

no. plain text it is. human readable. and grep/sed/diff able.

Re: Formatting code should be unnecessary

#54

Post by kmoser »

lxe wrote: post #27

> you could view the source however you wanted. Spaces vs. tabs didn't matter because neither affects the semantics and the editor on the system let you modify the program tree directly (known today as projectional editing). But formatting still doesn't matter. Outside of whitespace-dependent languages, formatting is a subjective thing -- it's a people concern, not a computer concern. I can store my JavaScript as AST…

There are annoying edge cases where formatting does matter, such as whitespace around HTML text nodes, e.g.:

  foo
vs:

  
    foo

Re: Formatting code should be unnecessary

#55

Post by danielheath »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #2

The tradeoff here is not being able to use a universal set of tooling to interact with source files. Anything but text makes grep, diff, sed, and version control less effective. You end up locked into specialized tools, formats, or IDE extensions, while the Unix philosophy thrives on composability with plain text. There's a scissor that cuts through the formatting debate: If initial space width was configurable in th…

If you’re going to store the source in a canonical format and unpack that to suit each developer… why should the canonical format just be regular source code?

All the same tools can exist with a text backend, and you get grep/sed support for free too!

Re: Formatting code should be unnecessary

#56

Post by jupp0r »

automatoney wrote: post #50

I've never understood why people care so much about the linter settings. It's so obviously bikeshedding, just make a choice, run the linter automatically and be done with it. I'm too busy doing actual software engineering to care about where exactly everything goes - I promise after a week you'll just get used to whatever format your team lands on.

I generally agree, but max line length being so high you have to horizontally scroll while reading code is very detrimental to productivity.

Re: Formatting code should be unnecessary

#57

Post by anticodon »

davetron5000 wrote: post #25

There’s also a typography element to formatting source code. The notion that all code formatting is mere personal preference isn’t true. Formatting code a certain way can help to communicate meaning and structure. This is lost when the minimal tokens are serialized and re-constituted using an automated tool. https://naildrivin5.com/blog/2013/05/17/source-code-typograp...

Yes. In Python, black formatter consistently breaks SQLAlchemy queries in an unreadable way (e.g. splitting conditions over multiple lines when it's not really necessary and makes reading harder).

Re: Formatting code should be unnecessary

#58

Post by eviks »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #2

The tradeoff here is not being able to use a universal set of tooling to interact with source files. Anything but text makes grep, diff, sed, and version control less effective. You end up locked into specialized tools, formats, or IDE extensions, while the Unix philosophy thrives on composability with plain text. There's a scissor that cuts through the formatting debate: If initial space width was configurable in th…

> If initial space width was configurable in their editor of choice, would those who prefer tabs have any other arguments?

Yes, of course, because tab width is * dynamically* flexible, so initial space width isn't enough

Re: Formatting code should be unnecessary

#59

Post by appellations »

jupp0r wrote: post #56
automatoney wrote: post #50

I've never understood why people care so much about the linter settings. It's so obviously bikeshedding, just make a choice, run the linter automatically and be done with it. I'm too busy doing actual software engineering to care about where exactly everything goes - I promise after a week you'll just get used to whatever format your team lands on.

I generally agree, but max line length being so high you have to horizontally scroll while reading code is very detrimental to productivity.

I forget there are people who don’t configure softwrap in their text editor.

Some languages (java) really need the extra horizontal space if you can afford it and aren’t too hard to read when softwrapped.

Re: Formatting code should be unnecessary

#60

Post by michaelmrose »

pwdisswordfishz wrote: post #46
sublinear wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody wants to have to run their own formatter rules in reverse in their head just to know what to grep for. That defeats the point of formatting at all.

That's why you grep for a syntactic structure, not undifferentiated text.

Which grep doesn't do and you need to either use a new different tool or more likely several for little real benefit
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