[josephg]

I hear you. But I’ve been programming for 30 years and I have some strong intuitions around where my code needs an empty line to space things out. Stuff like that. The day I first tried gofmt and it removed some of my carefully considered whitespace, I turned around, put blood on my hands in the old way and made a promise to the night that my soul belongs to me and gofmt will never sully my code with its corporate BS aesthetic.

Some consistency in a codebase is good. Naming consistency. Indentation. But people go too way far with it. Who cares if your JavaScript makes consistent use of semicolons? It doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter.

[neon_electro]

This is why linters are configurable; if your team doesn't care about consistent use of semicolons, ignore that linter.

Right?

[josephg]

Sure; but when I join a team and they've already got a linter set up with stupid pedantic rules, they never seem to appreciate my complaints about it. "Oh god, can we not have that conversation again!". I understand. But nobody is happy.

Carpentry isn't my jam, but I've taken up piano. I love it.

[Izkata]

I have similar feelings as GP about Black (probably the most popular python code formatter), which goes by the philosophy that linters should not be configurable because that just moves conversations about styles from the code to which rules to use.

[int_19h]

Black also behaves decently wrt empty lines. It does have some opinions on that, like two lines between functions and in some other contexts, and at most one line elsewhere. But inside function bodies, it will collapse multiple consequent blank lines into a single one, but it will never remove them altogether, so it's still possible to use them to logically structure code.