Software development topics I've changed my mind on

There is more than one type of people who stress over code style. There's the group who wants to discuss about how to style your code and then there's the group who wants to just use a common code formatter and be done with that.

For example, I have objections to rustfmt's default style. I would never start discussions on rust projects about changing that to another formatter or changing its configuration. I definitely would carefully ask that people should really use rustfmt, though, if they don't do so yet.

Edit: This comment was based on misreading the parent comment. I've left it up, but I should have been more careful.

You've set yourself up to always be the outlier. To always need to have that discussion or tweak the rules on every project you work with.

You've increased the overhead of onboarding anyone used to the default style. You've increased the overhead of you working on anyone else's projects that is more likely to have the default style.

All of that is friction introduced because you haven't learned to live with the default style.

Do I love that the default C# rules put a new line before the else block? No, but I've learned to live with it so that I can work on all manner of projects without fussing over that style option every time.

By adhering to default rules, you never have to have the endless arguments such as tabs vs spaces again. ( Spaces won, and the tabbers got over it fairly quickly once it was the default in almost all formatters. )

I believe you may have misunderstood my comment, as I agree.

What I understood from your parent comment was the exact opposite, i.e. that they’re saying “I disagree with some of the default choices of the formatter (and so would prefer they were different) but I never voice those because it’s not worth it. However, I do think everyone should use something, whatever it is (even if the default style), as opposed to nothing”.

I apologise, I misread your statement as: "I would never start discussions on rust projects *without* changing that to another formatter" which changed the meaning entirely. I should have taken a moment to re-read what you wrote.

> I definitely would carefully ask that people should really use rustfmt, though, if they don't do so yet.

If you don't already, you should run `cargo fmt --check` in CI and block PR merges until it passes. You can also run it in a pre-commit hook, but you can't be sure everyone will set that up.

Automating such types of decision is great but moot if others have to opt into it.

Code formatters are the best of both worlds. I despise Allman-style indentation for reasons I can't explain or justify, but if I have to work on a codebase that uses it, I can simply put hooks to reformat it to whatever the repo style is before commit.