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My theory is that excessive linter rules might be a symptom of trying to compensate for the weaknesses of a programming language. I see it a lot in Python and JavaScript projects where the language gives very litte guarantees about anything.

If you use a programming language that affords some guarantees like Haskell or even just C#, people seem to be less interested in linters.

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Linting reduces the expressiveness of a language so that a large team can have some consistency.

It’s not necessarily a weakness of the language.

Languages like Haskell, C#, and Java don’t have the same amount of expressiveness as js, python, or ruby, so they don’t benefit as much from a linter, though I know places that use one for C# to prevent usage of the ‘var’ keyword

I have that at my current place with var in Java.

And enforcing new lines on else or catch after the brace, completely different to the language guides.

It looks a fucking mess.

It’s okay to want more.

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