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Software development topics I've changed my mind on

(chriskiehl.com)
873 points belter | 1 comments | 05 Feb 25 09:50 UTC | HN request time: 0.201s | source
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latexr ◴[05 Feb 25 11:39 UTC] No.42947128[source]▶
> 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”.

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xnorswap ◴[05 Feb 25 11:46 UTC] No.42947187[source]▶
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

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pugworthy ◴[05 Feb 25 17:36 UTC] No.42952137[source]▶
Agreed. I don't care what the indentation is or formatting is, as long as it's consistent.
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1. dsego ◴[06 Feb 25 10:02 UTC] No.42960848[source]▶
I sometimes care when I want to introduce empty space to visually make parts of code stand out, eg multiple blank lines between functions or classes etc. I think whitespace can be effectively used like paragraphs in a book, basically make different blocks more obvious. Most formatters just squash everything to be one empty line apart, for me it can be annoying.