Software development topics I've changed my mind on

> Most won't care about the craft. Cherish the ones that do, meet the rest where they are

> (…)

> People who stress over code style, linting rules, or other minutia remain insane weirdos to me. Focus on more important things.

What you call “stressing over minutiae” others might call “caring for the craft”. Revered artisans are precisely the ones who care for the details. “Stressing” is your value judgement, not necessarily the ground truth.

What you’re essentially saying is “cherish the people who care up to the level I personally and subjectively think is right, and dismiss everyone who cares more as insane weirdos who cannot prioritise”.

The solution is to have computers enforce the code style. Pick a linter, pick a set of rules, and then forget about them.

Things I beleive:

- If you're picking up on code-style in PRs then your toolchain is backward.

- If you're changing linting rules every month then you're focussed on the wrong things

- It's better to have a consistent style than a perfect style

Yes. I love how gofmt has no settings, basically. Is this how you envisioned? Great. Now I don't have to think about optimizing it.

Coincidentally, the choices they made are the choices I'd made, but it doesn't matter in the end.

IMO, gofmt doesn't go far enough. It should sort imports and break lines automatically, or you end up with different people with slightly different preferences for breaking up lines, leading to an inconsistent style.

Something like gofumpt + golines + goimports makes more sense to me, but I'm used to ruff in Python (previous black + isort) and rustfmt.

I'd say that if you're manually formatting stuff with line breaks and spaces, that should have been automated by tooling. And that tooling should run both as a pre-commit hook and in CI.

Be careful what you wish for. Sometimes leaving a line stupidly long is better for readability than awkwardly trying to break it up.

If you have five similar statements somewhere with only one exceeding the linter's line length, breaking up that one can lead to code that is harder to parse than just leaving it jutting out by way of an exception to the general rule; especially if it contains some predictable bit of code.