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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

One thing that's nice about being a programmer is that I haven't thought about any mechanics of text formatting for many years. When I save a file, it just gets reformatted according to rules that were set up exactly once. I have no idea whether or not I use spaces or tabs, or whether there are semicolons at the end of lines, or whether it's "} else {" or "}\nelse {".

It makes me sad that the least technical users have to use the most primitive software tooling. Something that programmers never think about (because they are best equipped to program their own programming tools) is apparently something that results in national studies and extremely snide articles because nobody will make good tools for them that end the problem once and for all.

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Being a programmer won't save you from this particular style war. If there's a comment in your code with a sentence that begins with a double space, your code formatter probably won't flag or remove it in the same way that MS Word will. And it's likely shown in a monospace font, which makes it more noticeable.

How many spaces do people put after a full stop in comments in their code?

I go with one, but Vim's J and gq commands annoyingly insert two spaces when joining sentences from separate lines. I'd love it if someone could tell me how to fix this.

Edit: found it, the command is "set nojoinspaces"

Broadly speaking, internal consistency is the best & most important style. So just follow the convention of the codebase you are working in (ideally with a code formatter to help)

I go for two, but that's only because it is now in my muscle memory to apply two spaces after a full stop. This came about when I was doing a typing certificate in the UK in the late 90s and I've continued to do it ever since.

It is even more amusing in Java. Many folks essentially try to do markdown, not realizing that they are probably writing one giant paragraph.

> I have no idea [...] whether it's "} else {" or "}\nelse {".

You never read your own code?

Format to personal style on open. Format to project style on save. The project style is then consistent, but irrelevant.

This sounds good and might work for programmers who are working in well-established languages with mature tooling.

For me, I’m opening so many kinds of text files, I’d need a parade of parsers and pretty-printers to pull it off. I can’t see it being a realistic option in the near term.

Same here. In a given week, I’ve opened files across 6 different {programming} languages

I have tried this but the formater in Eclipse messes up too many edgecases or nicely column aligned struct definitions to make it work for me.

You have your text editor set up to use a formatter which handles the number of spaces after periods, in source code comments and plain text files? How?

This isn't the same kind of text formatting as that though.

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