← Back to context

Comment by yourbandsucks

7 years ago

Probably because, if there's a real bug, the patch is by definition an improvement even if the whitespace isn't to everybody's liking?

The tech community has pivoted hard to an obsession with the superficial in recent years. I'm not gonna do 10 iterations of catering to someone's personal tastes in order to do them a favor. They can take it or leave it.

6 comments

yourbandsucks

Reply
ay  7 years ago

It’s also that if the guidelines about the whitespace are so important, just automate the thing.

I like quite a lot the approach taken at my $dayjob: the files that you change must not change if one uses ‘indent’ twice on them (twice because some of indent’s opinions are bistable). And there is a script that brings the non compliant files to compliant state.

So I don’t have to think of whitespacing at all while coding and can make “good” before submitting. And, even if I don’t like that particular style of whitespacing, I do admit the code which is uniformly whitespaced is easier to read and maintain.

  • mercer  7 years ago

    I really like how a number of languages now have a code formatter built in (Elixir, Go(?)). I might not always like how it formats my code, but most of the time I do. Furthermore, it:

    1) spares everyone a whole bunch of bike-shedding and bickering

    2) often teaches me how to better format my code

    3) speeds up my work slightly because quite often I can just messily write my code and rely on the formatter to fix it.

Gigablah  7 years ago

There was an upvoted article on HN the other day [1] where the gist of it was:

"If you don't have a separate documentation website for your open-source project, it's not worth my time."

This is as superficial as it gets.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18150876