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by jjgreen 1616 days ago
No, this first came up at a place I worked, someone suggested using it, we evaluated it, this was one of the things that annoyed me, because it doesn't matter. After quite a bit of time discussing and configuring it we decided not to proceed. From time-to-time I'll look at it again, but it seems to get more bossy as time goes by.
2 comments
wrs 1616 days ago
Enforcing consistent choices for things that don’t matter is most of the value of a code style linter. In fact “things that don’t matter” is not a bad definition of “code style”.

(BTW, “then” on a multiline “if” is definitely outside mainstream Ruby style, based on my decade of experience...this is not one of Rubocop’s controversial defaults.)

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jjgreen 1616 days ago
I'm not sure I agree, code style is (or should) be about things like method length, naming conventions, iteration styles ... those do matter and should be in the scope of a linter. The presence of the word "then" which makes no difference to the resulting bytecode but does make the code more readable (IMHO) is not.

(BTW, I've seen "then"s aplenty in my decade-and-a-bit of Ruby experience, possibly this is a geographical thing, like the SF no-parentheses-in-methods thing)

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wrs 1615 days ago
I guess one could distinguish between “code formatter” and “code style linter” and declare that anything that doesn’t affect the resulting binary (“doesn’t matter” in your definition) has to be in the former. But I don’t think I’d want such a strict division of tools. I think formatting does matter.

Sounds like maybe rubocop needs “-east-coast” and “-west-coast” presets. :)

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epidemian 1616 days ago
> because it doesn't matter

But, if it doesn't matter, why not let RuboCop make all `if`s consistent with `rubocop --auto-fix` and be done with it, instead of configuring RuboCop to not complain about it?

It seemed that this style choice did, in fact, matter a bit. At least enough to make you change RuboCop's defaults to accommodate to it. And that's fine; that's why those things are configurable :)

Of course, it's also fine to decide not to use RuboCop if you need to reconfigure a lot of it's defaults. Fighting with our own tools doesn't make any sense, but for some reason it's not an uncommon thing to do in this industry.

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