Ask HN: Learning go – why is “gofmt” such a big deal?

1 pointspdustin3 comments

Quite curious about this one, and thought I'd pose the question here. I've recently started to learn Go - quite a wonderful language for some server-side processing libraries I'm working on - and I recall seeing many people say, "gofmt is the bomb," or, "gofmt is one of the greatest things any programming language could have." It seems that the big deal is simply that nobody argues over code formatting.

However, with tools like EditorConfig [0] making code formatting concerns largely irrelevant in a given repo (aside from syntax-affecting formatting issues), it seems to me that the code formatting imposed by gofmt isn't really awesome, but rather that it was there first.

Is that the case? Is that all there is to gofmt - it was there first, so nobody bothered arguing?

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CL-USER 50 > (PPRINT '(DEFUN FOO (A B C) (* (+ A B C) (+ (EXPT A 2) (EXPT B 2) (EXPT C 2 )) (+ (EXPT A 3) (EXPT B 3) (EXPT C 3))))) (DEFUN FOO (A B C) (* (+ A B C) (+ (EXPT A 2) (EXPT B 2) (EXPT C 2)) (+ (EXPT A 3) (EXPT B 3) (EXPT C 3))))