It's incredible how little money some people get paid to build foundational pieces in a multi-trillion dollar industry.
That said, it brings in _much_ more value than $1.5k/mo. It has eliminated styling arguments on teams that adopt it. The amount of time saved in PRs/reduction of bikeshedding is very valuable.
My personal impression is that the code style bike shedding is a sign of team immaturity. In the more mature teams (composed of more mature persons), I haven't really seen formatting bike shedding.
Since when did caring about readability equated to bike-shedding and immaturity?
> Since when did caring about readability equated to bike-shedding and immaturity?
Since never, I didn't claim that. On the contrary, Prettier leads to less readable code than what a human can produce. Bike-shedding is endless bickering about some specific, meaningless thing.
In mine, it used to be... at least half, because I was anal about code style and consistency and all we had at the time was ESLint, which only did partial code stile.
Nowadays, it's none. If you need to worry about code style in code reviews, use a tool.
But the big win for code formatters is fewer decisions. Decision fatigue is real.
What's wrong with the application of e.g. Prettier? Is it wrong enough that it's worth your time to manually format however many thousands of LOC, making countless micro decisions along the way?
It doesn't, really. On larger projects, you read much more code than you write.
Formatting well is not something complex - I basically just format with WebStorm, and only tweak that (mostly line breaks). People (including me) are going to read that code many times, I think it's worth the little effort.
On the opposite, I often have to work hard to make Prettier produce readable code. Like, "how do I need to write this code, so Prettier doesn't mess it up?", which is often difficult / frustrating.
When I embraced formatters, I started spending so much less time and effort keeping the style "correct" and worrying about how other people on the team format code. I love just hitting save in my editor and having the code formatted without having to fiddle with quotes, wrapping, etc.
With regard to bike-shedding about style, it mostly goes away once a team adopts one of the standard formatters for a given language. That's sort of the whole point.
I worked on a team without a formatter for more than 5 years. I'm certain many people have done the same. "Essential" is overselling.
All that time spent staring at code that could have been more readable, or writing style guides and reformatting code, is now spent doing what we were trying to do in the first place. And now, speeding up the time we wait to apply formatting or check it in CI by rewriting it in Rust™ gives us a bit more of that time back. :)
I don't know what to say other than, if these people are out of a job, and you're a company funding prettier or need good JS people, please hire them.
Even a $20K bounty for that amount of work doesn't even seem worth it to boot up my IDE.