Comment by phoghed

2 days ago

Waiting patiently for the other person to produce a post hoc rationalization about why everybody’s code looking different is in fact a good thing

24 comments

phoghed

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maratc  2 days ago

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.

  • refactor_master  2 days ago

    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.

    • phoghed  2 days ago

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

    • maratc  2 days ago

      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.

      10 replies →

  • preg_match  1 day ago

    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.

  • jghn  1 day ago

    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.

insanitybit  2 days ago

Can you not read code if it uses single vs double quotes?

  • 9dev  2 days ago

    I can - in fact, I have to, a lot more than I'd like - when someone makes changes with different code style settings in their IDE or tooling, and that affects unrelated parts of the code, and suddenly the PR contains tons of code that just looks subtly different but still does the same thing.

    If sieving the spam from ham in code reviews is your thing, go have fun.

    I personally prefer code that is automatically and unconditionally kept in the exact same shape, preserving only the intended changes to stop the team from wasting time on formatting or reviewing.

    • insanitybit  2 days ago

      That seems like a problem caused by an autoformatted, not solved by one. Obviously having reviewable commits is a reasonable expectation but that doesn't seem like a justification at all.

      1 reply →

  • dewey  2 days ago

    You are not making the strongest point by using a relatively subjective rule like that. It includes indentation, how to structure functions and the parameters and many more that in sum make it very easy to jump between projects (Internal company projects, dependencies, other open source projects) without ever getting used to a new style. This makes reading and contributing very easy.

    Compare that with other languages where you need to load a different set of prettier rules, code formatting tools and follow contribution guidelines on how things should look like depending on the opinion of the maintainers.

    • insanitybit  2 days ago

      I've never found this to be the case having jumped companies a fair bit. I can switch programming languages easily enough, surely I can handle formatting.