I've never had discussions about code formatting in PRs, this seems like a made up problem or something that predates my career.
Pretend they don’t exist as much as you’d like, tell everyone their lived experience is wrong, that the tools arose from delusion and not any real world need, and that they benefit no one.
I’ll keep using them though, and never suffer from someone writing typescript with 4 spaces, leading commas, and no semicolons again.
I can believe the latter, and I can assure you this was a Big Deal back in the day. There's a reason Go ships with gofmt, and gofmt was somewhat revolutionary for being a built-in "you gotta do it like this" back in the day.
That's because everybody uses linters nowadays, which was the original point.
(I think that in their case it was partially because uniformity made correcting faster.)
Worse, sometimes you would start working on a project without having that discussion first, only to discover a few days later that the code was failing because different people had different indentation settings in their IDEs, both regarding tabs versus spaces and the number of spaces. You would then have to pause the work, go back, have the discussion, and decide who was going to fix all the code committed so far.
This only stopped when linters became popular. They may be a little like vaccines: when they work, you do not see them working, so it is easy to forget what things were like before. But believe me, when they appeared, they were a breath of fresh air. We could finally focus on discussing the work rather than the conventions.
And tabs versus spaces is only one example. There used to be PR discussions about countless style issues throughout the entire lifetime of a project. That was not entirely unreasonable, because a consistent style genuinely makes a project easier to work on. But when every individual convention has to be negotiated by humans, it takes enormous amounts of energy and becomes tedious very quickly.
yeah, why Guido got away with the "we don't need deliminators, white space is just fine" for so long has always baffled me.
Because somehow a special character that marks the start and end of a block is hard for people to understand??
And the choice of whether to use tabs or spaces does not affect semantics. It is purely a matter of style. Indentation using tabs and indentation using spaces work in exactly the same way.
> It is purely a matter of style. Indentation using tabs and indentation using spaces work in exactly the same way.
This isn't true. It changes how the code can be interpreted by tooling, and it changes how Python interprets the code because it's whitespace sensitive. It's also invisible. It's such an extreme example, I don't think this is reasonable to bring into the conversation for style discussions.