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Formatting code should be unnecessary

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Re: Formatting code should be unnecessary

#101

Post by 3036e4 »

anticodon wrote: post #57
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).

For C++ clang-format does things like that all the time as well. Of course it has no idea what semantically belongs together on the same line or not. I wish the C++ world had settled on some other standard linter.

Re: Formatting code should be unnecessary

#102

Post by growse »

elevation wrote: post #88
jupp0r wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Formatters eliminating long lines is a pet peeve of mine. About once every other project, some portion of the source benefits from source code being arranged in a tabular format. Long lines which are juxtaposed help make dissimilar values stand out. The following table is not unlike code I have written: setup_spi(&adc, mode=SPI_01, rate=15, cs_control=CS_MUXED, cs=0x01); setup_spi(&eeprom, mode=SPI_10, rate=13, cs_co…

//nolint

Re: Formatting code should be unnecessary

#103

Post by smokel »

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've never understood why we still look at the plain text representation of code, and not a visualization of the code that makes more sense.

Note that, in my mind, this visualization is not automatically generated, but lovingly created by humans who wish their code to be understood by others. It is not separate from the code, as typical design documentation is, but an integral part of it, stored in metadata. Consider it an extension of variable and function naming.

There is of course "literate programming" [1], but somehow (improvements of) that never took off in larger systems.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming

Re: Formatting code should be unnecessary

#104

Post by VBprogrammer »

elevation wrote: post #88
jupp0r wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Formatters eliminating long lines is a pet peeve of mine. About once every other project, some portion of the source benefits from source code being arranged in a tabular format. Long lines which are juxtaposed help make dissimilar values stand out. The following table is not unlike code I have written: setup_spi(&adc, mode=SPI_01, rate=15, cs_control=CS_MUXED, cs=0x01); setup_spi(&eeprom, mode=SPI_10, rate=13, cs_co…

Those kind of tables improve readability right until someone hits a length constraint and had to either touch every line in order to fix the alignment, causing weird conflicts in VCS, or ignore the alignment and it's slow decay into a mess begins.

Re: Formatting code should be unnecessary

#105

Post by jraph »

smokel wrote: post #103
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've never understood why we still look at the plain text representation of code, and not a visualization of the code that makes more sense. Note that, in my mind, this visualization is not automatically generated, but lovingly created by humans who wish their code to be understood by others. It is not separate from the code, as typical design documentation is, but an integral part of it, stored in metadata. Consider…

> I've never understood why we still look at the plain text representation of code, and not a visualization of the code that makes more sense.

I suppose this is because nobody has been able to create good tooling for it (the visualization itself, the efficient editing, etc). You'll have to deal with the text version of it at some point if not all tools that we rely on get a version for the new visualization.

Another hypothesis is that it might not matter this much that we work with text directly after all.

> Note that, in my mind, this visualization is not automatically generated, but lovingly created by humans who wish their code to be understood by others.

If you allow manual crafting there, I suspect you'll need some sort of linting too.

Re: Formatting code should be unnecessary

#106

Post by perlgeek »

> Back when he was working on Ada, they didn't store text sources at all — they used an IR called DIANA. Everyone had their own pretty-printing settings for viewing it however they wanted.

What about comments? Were they part of the IR?

(I agree with others that version control, grep etc. are also very important, and kind of a deal breaker).

Re: Formatting code should be unnecessary

#107

Post by AdieuToLogic »

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've never understood why people care so much about the linter settings.

Source code formatting programs are not the same as lint[0] programs. The former rewrites source code files such that the output is conformant with a set of layout rules without altering existing logic. The latter is a category of idempotent source code analysis programs typically used to identify potential implementation errors within otherwise valid constructs.

Some language tools support both formatting and source code analysis, but this is an implementation detail.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lint_(software)

Re: Formatting code should be unnecessary

#108

Post by forrestthewoods »

raincole wrote: post #77
forrestthewoods wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll go a step further. I’ve never understood why people care so much about the linter. Just let people write code and don’t worry about the linter. I don’t need to fight a linter which makes my code worse when I could just write it in a way that doesn’t suck. I promise it’ll be fine. I’m too busy doing actual software engineering to care if code is not perfectly formatted to some arbitrary style specification. I fee…

People like you are the exact reason why linter is a thing.

Don’t be rude.

I write perfectly legible code. More legible than a linter infact. Because the rules for what is ideal are not so simple as to be encoded in simple lint rules. Sure it gets like 95%. But the last 5% is so bad it ruins the positives.

If your goal is “code that is easy to read and understand” then a linter is only maybe the first 20%. Lots of well linted code is thoroughly inscrutable.

Re: Formatting code should be unnecessary

#109

Post by forrestthewoods »

skinner927 wrote: post #72
forrestthewoods wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define high? I think 120 is pretty reasonable. Maybe even as high as 140. Log statements however I think have an effectively unbounded length. Nothing I hate more than a stupid linter turning a sprinkling of logs into 7 line monsters. cargo fmt is especially bad about this. It’s so bad.

I still prefer 80. I won’t (publicly) scoff at 100 though. IMO 120 is reasonable for HTML and Java, but that’s about it. Sent from my 49” G9 Ultrawide.

Ugh. 80 is the worst. For C++ it’s entirely unreasonable. I definitely can not reconcile “linters make code easier to read” and “80 width is good”. Those are mutually exclusive imho.

What I actually want from a linter is “120, unless the trailing bits aren’t interesting in which case 140+ is fine”. The ideal rule isn’t hard and fast! It’s not pure science. There’s an art to it.

Re: Formatting code should be unnecessary

#110

Post by Joker_vD »

skinner927 wrote: post #72
forrestthewoods wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define high? I think 120 is pretty reasonable. Maybe even as high as 140. Log statements however I think have an effectively unbounded length. Nothing I hate more than a stupid linter turning a sprinkling of logs into 7 line monsters. cargo fmt is especially bad about this. It’s so bad.

I still prefer 80. I won’t (publicly) scoff at 100 though. IMO 120 is reasonable for HTML and Java, but that’s about it. Sent from my 49” G9 Ultrawide.

Give a try to 132 mode, maybe? It was the standard paper width for printouts since, well, forever.
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