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”.

To reduce your argument to its essence, you're saying typesetting is part of the craft of writing. I've yet to meet an author who believes this (other than enjoying editing their own work as output from a typewriter), and I think the same broadly applies to code. It's not that everyone thinks these things are unimportant, it's that caring deeply about doing them a particular way is orthogonal to the craft. It's something that has long been lampooned (tabs vs. spaces, braces, etc.) as weird behavior.

More than one writer refuses to use a computer, preferring typewriters. Harlan Ellison learned how to repair typewriters after he could no longer find anyone to fix his. Stephen King wrote Dreamcatcher with a fountain pen.

Authors totally obsess over details that seem irrelevant to people outside that craft.

And that’s totally fine! But there is no correlation whatsoever between writing on a typewriter or using a fountain pen (or the physical experience of writing generally) and the quality of the writing. None.

There is nothing to support this in either writing or programming, at all. For every software craftsman out there obsessing over formatting, editor layout, linters, line length, there is an ancient, horrifyingly laid out C codebase that expertly runs and captures the essence of its domain, serves real traffic and makes real money.

Make your editor work how you like, but if my team lead started to get annoyed after my 4th formatting-only PR I should probably start to think about what I want them to bring up to my manager in my performance review.

> But there is no correlation whatsoever between writing on a typewriter or using a fountain pen (or the physical experience of writing generally) and the quality of the writing

I heard neal stephenson say that he writes using a pen rather than a wordprocessor specifically because it does affect the quality of the writing. Because he handwrites slower than he types, he does more thinking and editing in his head rather than after it's on paper.