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Comment by pelagicAustral | Hacker News Reader

I've read this twice and I'm still getting something like: "Programmers lack style, hence linters, but linters are draconian in nature, so we are going to slap a linter in the next release"

It is Friday and I'm tired, so maybe I need another re-read.

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(this is probably unfairly cynical but), reading heavily between the lines, this reads to me like DHH noticed lots of Rails folks and rubyists already like and use "standardrb" for this https://github.com/standardrb/standard -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVilOzkLdlI -- but for some (unspecified?) reason(s), wasn't willing to bless the popular community-created universal standard as default convention, so instead wrote up his own, and is declaring his the default convention for Rails.

This doesn't seem unfair to me at all.

I don’t get the impression that standardrb is that popular.

It’s also hyper strict, which is ok for a new project, but won’t play nicely with any legacy app.

Though I’m surprised DHH didn’t write his own RuboCop from scratch.

I think DHH explains the reason pretty well in the article

> That’s why we’re shipping a default linter, cleverly called RuboCop, in the next version of Rails. Not such that I, or anyone, can mandate what style your codebase ought to be written in, but such that you can find and enforce your own.

So every new Rails project has preset of linting style, which defaults to whatever the Rails team chose, but the point is that people are free to adjust the config file to whatever they prefer. So the same style is applied through the codebase.

No, that's all peachy, but you're just going to tell me the post doesn't start with one idea, smoothly moves on, and just past the code example, wraps it up by completely dismantling the premise?

> but linters are draconian in nature

His point is actually that linters lacking configuration are draconian.

> Some languages, like Go, have a built-in linter, which applies a universal style that’s been set by the language designers. That’s the most totalitarian approach.

I'd doubt it's the "built-in" aspect; it sounds quite a bit like it's the "universal style" that the author doesn't like.

I think you forgot "I don't like 'if !foo' but I don't know what a guard clause is."

This is from DHH, the Rails guy.

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