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Comment by uxp8u61q | Hacker News Reader

I don't want to disparage prettier, but to call it a foundational piece...

I agree. Foundational isn't the right word here. I would though accept "impactful". A lot of people care about code formatting "taken care of".

When seeing Prettier as a software tool, to consider Prettier more “foundational” than (e.g.) TypeScript or V8 does seem like an inversion of hierarchy [1] – but viewed as history, as a practice, Prettier’s accomplishment of making automatic code formatting (à la `go fmt` or Python `black`) widespread in JavaScript, the lingua franca of programming, is foundational.

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. :)

[1]: https://youtu.be/ar9WRwCiSr0

I wouldn't call it foundational, but it would be one of the first things I'd set up in a new JS based project, alongside unit tests, com/transpiling and eslint.

Maybe essential is a better word.

That is still far too much an exaggeration. This is an opinionated beautifier. Its a vanity item with some downstream utility benefits.

A formatter is pretty essential when working in a team. It saves tons of time wasted on code formatting in code reviews.

> A formatter is pretty essential when working in a team.

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.

I think at this point I would consider a formatter essential for working with a team. It helps make code style opinionated and fixed and I have no surprises when reading code. No one doing weird formatting to align random things. Any formatting tool that allows for pages upon pages of options is simply not something I want to deal with. Something like black, gofmt and prettier is vital

Bike shedding. I say this as somebody who has written a once prominent JavaScript code beautifier. Automating code beautification is a nice to have. It becomes essential when developers cannot be bothered to focus on more important things because either more important things are too challenging for the given developers or because the given developers want to feel more important than their contributions/decisions are actually worth.

Auto formatting tools like prettier and black didn’t use to be essential but they’re quickly becoming essential. Just look at the growth curves for pip and npm installs. I for one feel like my editor is broken if it doesn’t auto format on save.

How about ubiquitous?

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