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Comment by petesergeant

2 days ago

> this seems like a made up problem or something that predates my career

I can believe the latter, and I can assure you this was a Big Deal back in the day. There's a reason Go ships with gofmt, and gofmt was somewhat revolutionary for being a built-in "you gotta do it like this" back in the day.

What is "back in the day" here? I've been in this field for like 16 years.

  • Others may remember it differently, but I feel like things started to change somewhere between 2009 to 2012? People were still hand-indenting code back then, and your personal style felt like something you had a bit of ownership of or was a creative outlet for you. I think we are in a much better place now where the editor + a central config file owns the whole thing, and I'd be surprised to see a modern codebase where a formatter's defaults weren't being used.