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Comment by loloquwowndueo | Hacker News Reader

I think an automatic code formatted actually makes one’s job easier, not more complicated.

Absolutely! I'm grateful that I don't have to worry about code formatting any more. But I remember in one of my earliest job the company used style checkers as a pre-commit hook that rejected your commit if they found trailing whitespace. That was before code formatting was part of your IDE. (Especially for us front end devs who used Notepad++ rather than an IDE at the time).

And notepad++ had no easy way of showing trailing whitespace. So every commit was a dance of commit -> read rejection log -> remove trailing whitespace -> commit again.

I once worked on a project that would not even compile if a function had a param without a comment explaining the purpose of that param written with a specific format. Every comment was validated on compile time, you couldn't even comment code just to test something. Life was hell.

I have memories at my post grad school where any deviations from the expected code source formatting led to a -1 on the mark. On the first few projects it was not rare to see students getting marks well into two or three digits negatives.

Things that don't matter much. A nice consistent style is good to have, but it isn't something worth worrying about that much.

What's stopping you from configuring your editor to automatically strip trailing whitespace on save?

Code reviewers that made me type in trailing whitespace that editor stripped: "this change is on lines you are not modifying". Still makes my blood boil many years later.

Mostly the fact that this was 15 years ago :-)

That completely removes a whole slew of useless comments when people are reviewing code, it's such an amazing win, every single language should have it's styleguide published and a tool that forces it without any options.

The key to style guides is to not have so many rules. Agree on the number of spacing and where to put braces. Past that, it’s obsessing on form over function, which you cannot control simply by virtue of having many people work together on the same codebase.

You should worry more about how things are named, the number of abstractions used, and whether the code has any comments explaining the writer’s intent.

This is broadly what reasonable people believe, but there are crazy people who WILL obsess over form and nitpick your whitespaces or other trivial bullshit if given a chance. An authoritative style guide shuts down many such detours.

It's not even just about obsessive nitpicking. There are people who, for example, prefer code with spaces around the parens for conditions and people who don't. If there's no enforced style guide and one from each camp end up touching the same code, you're likely to get a bunch of pointless noise in the diffs. Even if no one is going to hold up a diff arguing over it, it makes it harder to review changes.

I think you can have as many rules as you want as long as there's something like black or rustfmt, just a script you run that auto-formats your code. You never have to worry about the rules because there is no configuration thus nothing to argue about. Sometimes your code gets formatted weird but who cares, just do your work.

Yes, but, on the other hand having a detailed style guide does make for short and simple debate during code review.

This often leads to extremely annoying codebase because languages trying to enforce styleguides without proper options just leads to inconsistency once any code in another language leads to the codebase.

Just have an options file which is checked in with the code and enforce whatever is set in there works much better. You still avoids all the useless discussions about formatting while also allowing to set sensible settings which are consistent with surrounding technology.

Not sure I understand this. Do you mean tools like "go fmt" are going to try to format your Java code?

This is really simple:

* All our code must be linted / formatted

* All their code must be ignored.

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