What do you dislike about bugs being highlighted as you type, rather than first having to run your code?
Because some things are better expressed in different rules.
That's why some syntax is optional in the first place, that's the reason it was made that way. The flexibility is a very intentional feature. It wasn't an accident.
Maybe you want multiple spaces to vertically align code in a complex set of logic. Maybe you want to express things on multiple lines to break them up. Maybe you have deep nesting so you want to go from 4 spaces to 2. Maybe you want no braces in a single line if statement except in certain cases. This could go for pages. Poof! All gone. You can't do any of it anymore.
Not following optional syntax like having a space after a comma or a space before a parenthesis is not a software bug. It's a waste of time. The compiler doesn't care and I don't either.
Instead it becomes a literal Blocking Issue most of the time. So instead of working on the actual blocking issues of the code base, you spend time doing "you did this here because of some context I don't understand and I'm not allowing it" You can't commit your code without conforming to it.
Also because linters are dumb. They "spot" things that are perfectly fine as supposed bugs (because they don't actually know types or logic, they're just dumb syntax checkers) and you have to work around them to satiate them with the possibility of introducing new bugs to prevent some tripwire system from false positives.
Compiler writers and language designers are the only people I've found who agree with me.
It's fine for protecting against profound levels of incompetence but I don't do that and you probably don't either.
I mean, I'll be the first to agree that blocking your development in the heat of it over some stylistic issue like quote styles is counter-productive, but if those rules are turned off and the rest help you catch actual bugs (and it's hard to argue that it does not), then that's surely a plus?
(Also, why wouldn't linters know types?)
It's not like I'm some grumpy malcontent that hasn't given it a go.
If you want to use it go ahead, I just thought I'd be standing in a larger crowd
I've got my linters set up pretty loosely, but the things that are enabled have definitely helped me detect bugs earlier and quicker, and I really don't see how anyone could be against that.
For instance something where I am the culprit would be in PHP. I like PHP. I think it's a convenient and powerful language. Someone could take my linter arguments and weaponize them against PHP because it's too easy to do terrible things with it. Then I'd be the one on the other side of the argument all of a sudden, standing in defence of this easy to use language with handy powerful abstractions that can trash a system in a few keystrokes.
I think the difference is when we can come to an agreement that say, PHP is a very powerful tool in competent hands and a very dangerous tool for the foolish.
Going back to the topic at hand, I think the foolish side of linting is the dominant application I see in the wild. I used to use a barrage of proto-linting static analysis tools in my CVS scripts during the wild C days because pointer logic and memory management was notoriously tricky and gcc 2.x was notoriously forgiving. These tools could save days of debugging, really, yes, days.
If we can do that for say python it'd be great. Something saying "Oh I see you are doing a list[1:] in a tight loop, have you thought about collections.dequeue? it may be a better option" - those things are things I do actually forget about and would find helpful.
It'd have to be voluntary though. Prod me a bit but then let me dig my own grave if it's a mistake. That's what the power of computing is also about.
That said, I'd argue against strict stylistic rules, not against linters in general. For example, the common Javascript linter (ESLint) has a setup wizard that allows you to choose whether you just want to check for bugs, or also enforce style conventions, and will enable a predefined set of rules depending on your choice. The bug-spotter is the one that's preselected. This is a very reasonable approach to me.
Aside, it’s funny that you dismiss linters as being for “type A folks who must have everything in its right place”, but your concerns seem to be that you want things in their right place and the linters won’t let you. The folks who use linters have decided worrying about it isn’t worth it and just let the linter do its thing, which is less “Type A” than how you describe yourself.
I'd say it's mostly hammers on porcelain. A coder carefully creates something (porcelain) and then the hammer comes around and insists it has to be a perfectly shaped commodity thing.
Same reason and emotion I guess behind both.
In my case, 99% of the time I’m fine with what the linter spits out. In cases where I want a particular structure I just wrap ignore directives around the section and move on with my life
> Maybe you want multiple spaces to vertically align code in a complex set of logic. Maybe you want to express things on multiple lines to break them up. Maybe you have deep nesting so you want to go from 4 spaces to 2. Maybe you want no braces in a single line if statement except in certain cases. This could go for pages. Poof! All gone. You can't do any of it anymore.
Literally none of these should be flagged by a linter IMO, except maybe the braceless if[1]. If those checks are present I would disable them. Those sound more like a code-styling tool, and is particularly egregious because every single thing you mentioned could be automatically changed by a code formatter!
Examples of things a good linter will pick up on: Unused variables, dead code, use before initialization.
The most absurd case of a linter helping was when fixing an unused variable lint warning actually allowed me to speed up a program by almost a factor of 100 (it precomputed a value and then called the version of the function that didn't use the precomputed value in a tight loop).
[edit]
Do you disable warnings in compiled languages? Note that linters for non-compiled languages are used at least partly to catch things that would be warnings or errors in a compiled language.
1: No braces in an if statement should probably be flagged when the THEN clause is on a separate line because it's a future bug waiting to happen, but I can see the argument for allowing it when it's a single-line statement. OTOH if (foo) {bar();} is only 2 characters longer and 4 if you put whitespace between the braces
The purpose of linters on a team - so I've been told - is so that no one has to argue about formatting anymore.
So now we just get to argue about what rules we can enable/disable?
Even though it's perfectly legal to disable linting for lines or files, most of the time when I do it, it's flagged by someone in review, and there's some discussion and I'm forced to rewrite and remove my disable and go back to whatever the linter was forcing. "These rules are there for a reason, and were put together by people with more experience and smarter than us - we shouldn't go disabling things whenever we want just because we don't like them or think we know better". (amalgamation of multiple comments from people stopping me disabling lint checks in specific situations).
This doesn't happen every time, but enough that the occasional 'disable' isn't something I can just do without worrying it will end in multiple hour discussions. Which is probably what people want - unquestioning conformity to "the one true way".
Code formatting is just one feature a linter may have (e.g. shellcheck[1] and pyflakes[2] are definitely linters but don't have code formatting checks).
I disable all the formatting checks in my linters because if I want to enforce a formatting standard, a code reformatter is probably a better way to do it.
People who argue this are, I believe, missing the forest for the trees. A short on-the-spot version of something I've had in mind for a long time:
almost everyone has a slightly different style that they fall into and the individual styles arent necessarily difficult to understand
AT LEAST WHEN USED ON THEIR OWN, AND NOT MIXED WITH OTHER STYLES.
Your Brain Adapts To A Given One, When Reading That Style. It May Still Feel Like Stuttering, But Once Adapted It's Fully Readable.
Evensomeonewithareallybizarrestylecanbereadwithalittleefforttofigureoutwhatthatstyleis.
The problemcomeswhen You have MULTIPLE people OnA team, and THE SYLES getallmixedupsoittakes a lot moreefforttofigureoutwhatTHEFUCKisgoingon.
Linting is all about picking a style and sticking with it so the code doesn't end up with multiple personality disorder.
> Even though it's perfectly legal to disable linting for lines or files, most of the time when I do it, it's flagged by someone in review, and there's some discussion and I'm forced to rewrite and remove my disable and go back to whatever the linter was forcing. "These rules are there for a reason, and were put together by people with more experience and smarter than us - we shouldn't go disabling things whenever we want just because we don't like them or think we know better". (amalgamation of multiple comments from people stopping me disabling lint checks in specific situations).
When this happens, I think it should open a wider team conversation about whether that particular rule is actually worthwhile, or whether it goes against what your team wants and should be altered/disabled. Unfortunately, I have encountered a couple rules where the linter wasn't configurable enough to get what we wanted as a team, so there's definitely reason to allow per-instance disabling...
Everybody starts at a profound level of incompetence. If you want a junior to be able to make a contribution and you don't want to spend half of the pull request discussing mundane aspects of their code style, then linters and formatters improve the situation somewhat.
many things "highlighted as you type" aren't "bugs".
let greeting = "Hello " + user.name;
but... I might be making a change to it a few minutes later... but I've got some damn visual shit flashing in my eyes that "USE A CONST"
concat strings? PREFER TEMPLATE!!!
OK, ESlint, have it your way, please auto-correct that...
`Hello ${ user.name}`;
And... this is just one set of 'best practices' to learn - change per language/framework/team multiple times (sometimes in the same week) and it's... difficult.
Yes, I'm an old-fogey. I have close to 30 years of muscle memory of using string concat and double quotes. "auto-fixing as I type" brings a huge interruption of flow, and THESE ARE NOT BUGS. They are style choices someone else is imposing on me. It doesn't make the code less buggy. It doesn't make the client any happier. If someone else coming in to the code is genuinely confused, confounded or severely impeded by
let greeting = "Hello " + user.name;
Goodness help folks when new management comes in and demands a new 'better' style.
I'd always argue for using it that way, which is very reasonable to me.
(A bit weird to have 30 years of muscle memory writing `let`, btw :) )
Again, an issue with switching between projects/styles, for me - one client/project insists on "const" in JS. Another client/project is supporting a product on IE9 for a client of theirs, but doesn't use any build tool for some of that JS, so we're not even supposed to use "let" or anything else "new" for some of that project. Mentally switching between those two worlds is like jumping between 2019 and 2009 every few days.
Realistically, could we introduce a transpiler? Technically yes, but operationally? It's a Frankenstein project that has so many larger issues that's low on the list for people (sections of the functionality are being migrated over to react altogether, and throwing 'more tools' in to the mix on legacy stuff is not desired).