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Comment by maratc | Hacker News Reader

My argument is more to the tune of "everybody’s code looking slightly different is not a problem in practice as long as I can read and understand it."

However since you've asked so nicely here you go: everybody’s code looking different is because all humans are different. It's what makes us human. I am very serious about my craftsmanship, and I bring my "humanity" to it: sometimes I include a cultural reference (as in the example above), or an internal joke in the name of a (very long) variable, or vent my frustration in a comment.

My first ten years of writing Python were uneventful; nobody commented about my style and I never commented about others'. With the advent of grammar nazi bots, everyone is supposed to now please them by writing completely bland code, which in my opinion degrades me from a craftsman to a code-monkey. This is dehumanising, in a certain sense.

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But your choice of funny variable names is not a craft, and you’re not a craftsman if you think it matters. What matters is extensibility, maintainability and value delivered.

I care how the food tastes, not that the chef has a really cool Japanese knife and is really fast at cutting onions.

I need a kitchen linter to highlight dishes red that my kids leave around rather than putting in the sink or dishwasher

I think you miss the point, but using your foodie reference: would you rather go to a couple of Michelin restaurants -- where each piece brings a reflection of the chef, the geographic area, and what quality ingredients were available on that day -- or would you rather only eat at McDonald's for an experience that is extremely consistent across days, seasons, and continents?

Now imagine a chef who has a nice little restaurant but is now being sent a couple of "quality assurance" guys from McDonald's who tell him that his choice of potato variety for chips does not exactly conform to the "standards" defined at the mothership.

A chef in a michelin restaurant, unless he/she is the sole employee (very rare) is likely in charge of a team of line cooks and while they may get some time and place to experiment you better believe it will not be when preparing the chefs carefully curated menu and recipes for paying customers who have been on a reservation waitlist for months. Bob decided to cook the broccoli with a blowtorch and substituted some ingredients in table 9s dinner. There is a fire in the kitchen and the NYT food critic is going into anaphylactic shock but Bob at least feels like an artist so we will let it slide.

The one day, your chef leaves, the food goes to shit and productivity/output/morale drops. When the new chef arrives, then everyone has to relearn everything.

Software shouldn't be bespoke and "artisan".

And here's where this abstraction breaks: when a programmer leaves, their code is not going anywhere.

The bigger problem is this: you want me to be a cog wheel, but I want to be an artist.

I too want to be an artist, but I work in an economy that requires me to be an artist mostly in my off hours.

And honestly, this is such a weird hill to die on. Lint rules when automated are basically pure win in most scenarios, and for your example, just exclude the rule for this block.

> The bigger problem is this: you want me to be a cog wheel, but I want to be an artist.

Well, that's the ball game then. This isn't the industry to be an artist in, especially post-AI.

I think the artisanal code industry will exist. It will not be large and it will not pay well.

Then go be an artist and leave the rest of us to tend our well oiled machines.

Take it to your employer then, not to us.

We want maintainable code we can quickly onboard in, and be able to modify and extend. Your artistry is getting in the way of other people getting stuff done.

The hidden implication in your extension of the foodie analogy is that consistent food must have worse quality.

That's not true, and if anything in software having consistent software delivery makes it more likely to achieve Michelin-graded level of quality, not less.

But the formatting is not all that "delivery" stands for.

I've worked on great codebases that would produce thousands of linter errors (lowball estimation), and on shitty codebases that were 100% compliant.

I'd go so far as to argue that person to person differences are helpful to a reader. When I am dealing with a long term code base it's easy to develop a feel for who is responsible for different constructs without needing to rely on the git history. This gives me immediate information on what to expect.

It depends wildly on how one defines "slightly". If it overflows in the editor, then that's a problem IMO. But some people would say no. In PHP we often see this type of thing:

  $someArr = [
    'config' => [
      'system' => 'linux',
      ...
     ],
  ];

Versus:

  $someArr =
    [
      'config' =>
        [
          'system' => 'linux',
          ...
        ],
    ];

Well... option 2 uses both significantly more vertical space, and horizontal space. But it's technically PSR compliant. However, we really need standard formatting on this, because it's annoying.

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