I'm so happy that languages are settling more and more on heavy reformatter usage. I'd like to think it was triggered by Go and gofmt. Working on a team where each engineer has their own personal syntax is not fun.
Indeed, I don't like Black's style, but I prefer working in a Black codebase than one where everyone has their own preference. Having style guidelines in a team is also a great way to remove pointless debates when reviewing PRs.
Agreed, and what's interesting is that despite all of those pointless style debates, there hasn't been much pushback on using reformatters (that I've seen). This tells me that the debates weren't really about "my style is objectively best" but more about "I'd like to use a consistent/predictable style (with preference to mine)."
Quite right, I have not met a lot of people that were actually strongly opinionated about their coding style. They simply did not want to use a tribal one that was not well defined that just added friction to the development process.
...which is why I wish Black allowed more configuration. A team can often agree on a set of styles. Every team on the Python planet agreeing... now that's much harder
I disagree on that though. By sticking to vanilla Black (no pun intended) you ensure that people joining your time will probably already be familiar with the style, you prevent strongly opinionated employees from pushing for changes in the linter config.
Black is opinionated, so it skips the debate entirely. We just use Black, not black with 120 characters lines, just Black.
To each their own I guess, but to me it just seems like pandora's box. Once you show that you are open to changes in the linting configuration, it makes the rules mutable and pretty much guarantees that at some point someone will say "how about we just change this one parameter in the linter", which will probably be agreed by the rest of the team, not because they actually agree but because they don't want to argue.
That does not really matter as long as the default are somewhat sensible. As far as I can tell Black's are.
gofmt is also opiniated. Someone somewhere picked the defaults and maybe I disagree with those defaults, but in the grand scheme of things, all go code is more approachable because it all looks the same. That to me, is worth a lot more than having my favorite format be the one on top.
Go and gofmt definitely pushed a lot of the momentum of the current wave but don't forget to give respect to Ruby / Rubocop where it's due, where the adage of Convention over Configurability has reigned supreme for decades.
Sure but the style guide standards exist and it's pretty rare for a Ruby application to stray from them (from my experience at a multi-billion dollar public company Ruby shop)
Style guides are a notorious time-sink where people will spend enormous amounts of time debating various conventions without that being linked to measurable benefits. One of the big problems here is that people notoriously conflate “familiar” with “better” and you rarely run the counter-experiment showing that after a couple weeks everyone would be familiar with any of the serious proposals.
The advantage of a tool like Black is that it avoids that constant bikeshedding and the fact that it actually does the work for you puts the conversation in a different light because the option which is the least work is just letting Black format the code. Whatever you pick for style, you really want automatic formatting to avoid it seeming like a chore.
> Style guides are a notorious time-sink where people will spend enormous amounts of time debating various conventions without that being linked to measurable benefits.
It feels like we're trying to justify the continued employment of uncooperative, contrarian egoists. Pick a style and use it or they can go find another job to waste time debating nonsense.
There's some truth to that but I think it's more than that. This comes up all of the time in the UI world: if you ask people their opinion on something in the abstract, they'll often provide a ton of ideas but if you give them something which they can use now they'll probably either say it's okay or come up with a much smaller list of things they actually care about. Things like style guides are especially tricky here because people have opinions but they don't get a bill for changes — having a formatter available can shift that dynamic to where you can basically say “Black does this for free every time you hit save. Are you willing to build a tool which maintains that level of effort?”
I've had that happen a few times and the number of people who will volunteer opinions has consistently been at least an order of magnitude larger than those who are willing to contribute something like linter or formatter configuration.