Comment by 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.
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.