Hacker News Reader

Comment by streblo | Hacker News Reader

> It was bikeshedding at its worst

It's ironic that discussions about formatting are taking up so much mindshare in the python community. For years all you'd hear was that whitespace significance was a sign of the lowliness of python. Meanwhile, tons of people were ignoring the bikeshedding and getting things done. Now it's one of the most widely used languages in existence.

The kinds of people that are focused on issues like formatting never seem to be focused on the things that actually matter - being productive and being able to get things done. That's what has always mattered about python, and what has always made it excellent.

View on HN

I completely agree. Who cares if black is ugly? It's a standard which is easy to automate. Want a better standard? Make it. Until then black works.

> Beautiful is better than ugly.

Things in this industry are divided into those that get complained about and those that get forgotten.

> Want a better standard? Make it.

That is what this post is advocating for, his own fork of black.

Yes, but in this case it was all bark with no bite. The author has made 0 commits to his fork since forking (in Feb).

From other comments it looks like the author can be quite vitriolic, so it is possible that a lot of the criticism he receives here is fair in tone. But to me this looks a bit premature, the article sounded like a declaration of intent (especially regarding refactoring the code per se).

In particular I understand that there are wrong ways to complain (and possibly the author is guilty of them), but this specific blog felt over the top and emotional (something I sympathize after unrelated experiences in failing to understand how to organize an Poly/ML project) but not unfair.

I personally think Black has the most beautiful style of the Python formatters. For example, I really dislike yapf's way of doing things.

Python has always cared about formatting. If you feel like you never needed to worry about things like that, it's because someone else already thought long and hard about it, and encoded it in pep8. No need for debates.

Frankly, after having been out of the Python ecosystem for a long time, I'm surprised that something like black ever gained traction, if it really has strayed in any significant sense from pep8.

The entire reason you have been able to ignore stupid formatting debates like this for so long is because of things like pep8 and strict definitions of what entails "Pythonic" code.

What happened?

Contra the complaints in the article it is not about black ignoring pep8, it is that pep8 has always had some grey areas and some parts that are simply wrong for modern python code. Black has become the defacto gofmt in the python world by just getting the job done. It is strongly opinionated, but most of the areas of contention were either open-ended before or not worth arguing about; at this point most people are willing to relent on the annoyances or minor non-standard bits for the sake of the benefits black brings to a project.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com