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by kbenson 3762 days ago
> I dislike the idea of this tool quite a bit.

> This tool may be a terrible idea, but the idea of automated prose linting is not terrible.

So which is it? The idea of the tool is prose linting, and you've now stated both that you dislike it quite a bit, and that it's not terrible.

Part of what I think you may be missing, is that it doesn't need to be an all inclusive set of generally terrible, conflicting suggestions. With code style checkers we've already mostly solved this problem, by both storing metadata regarding the source of the rules, and allowing this metadata to be referenced when making custom rulesets. Perl::Critic[1] is a good example of this. It allows you to use the default ruleset and select a severity of criticism, or it allows an organisation (or individual) to create their own custom ruleset to enforce how they want their code to look.

Keeping this in mind, what if the default ruleset was curated to have select rules from multiple sources, but allowed you to easily take a source and use its rules? For example, if I want to write using Strunk & White today, that might be as easy as a command line flag, or downloading a specifically compiled ruleset. If I want to use something else, the same. If I want to make my own custom ruleset based on rules from multiple rulesets and a few of my own thrown in, that should be possible too.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl::Critic