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Comment by ehsankia | Hacker News Reader

> We also released an alpha version of our Black-compatible code formatter.

Interesting that Ruff has replaced so many linters, and now going for formatter next. One tool to rule them all!

Extra interesting that Ruff appears to provide more knobs than Black, which will likely be a big plus for those not happy with how opinionated Black is.

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For teams, I'm not sure the knobs are a good thing. Sounds like it will just be another source of infinite bikeshedding arguments. I am a big fan of "set up Black and forget about it", even if I dislike some things it does (like the space after the colon in one-sided slices).

It doesn’t look like ruff will get too many options, since its maintainers (or at least one of them) agree with you

https://github.com/astral-sh/ruff/discussions/7310#discussio...

Configurability is good. Ruff has thousands of linter options to bikeshed over, a few for the formatter won't hurt much more.

For every bikeshedder there are those of us who just set it to the defaults and disable one or two rules and call it a day. I run mypy in strict mode and vanilla ruff with only the line length rule adjusted and it’s been great and sensible

No it isn't good (in this case). All the options are pointless aesthetic choices that don't make a difference in correctness or performance, and the time spent tweaking them is far better spent pushing features and fixes.

Isn't this a people problem and not a technical problem?

People will never agree about minor, non-consequential choices, especially choices that are not objectively good or bad. Where these decisions have no effect on the quality of the output of the work (like trivial formatting settings), it's better to pick an arbitrary side, e.g. choose Black's set of decisions, live with them, and focus on actual work.

Yes, and what I am saying is that if people on your team cannot let a trivial, unimportant technical detail go, that is a people problem.

You may have avoided the silly argument about code formatting. But if that tendency lives in your engineers, they will find another nit to pick somewhere else.

In my opinion this is not a problem best solved by technology.

But someone on the team has to take time, no matter how little, to choose which way to go for all these pointless nits. Again, they don't matter, why does anyone on the team have to work on them? Just use Black's settings and move on.

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