Here's a few commits of changes:
(A whole bunch of manual changes based on its suggestions) https://github.com/nickjj/plutus/commit/9af66d31f98bef841588...
(Re-enable line length) https://github.com/nickjj/plutus/commit/21789f89bbcee37913c1...
(Force _ prefix for unused variables) https://github.com/nickjj/plutus/commit/a272c77b932e1c78558a...
(Auto-corrected by Ruff) https://github.com/nickjj/plutus/commit/6fe69cf88385ebdf9b8c...
Here's "bad" code:
important_numbers = {
'x': 3,
'y': 42, # Answer to the Ultimate Question!
'z': 2
}
important_numbers = {"x": 3, "y": 42, "z": 2} # Answer to the Ultimate Question!
The actual problems in the code I work with are not the spaces at the end of line or imports in non-alphabetic order, it's the 10-line list comprehensions that are so long that they're impossible for me to parse. None of these tools catch that. My place used pylint, flake8, black, ruff -- with hundreds of commits on every change. All that energy could be better spent elsewhere.
It is what it is, everyone gets the same, shut up and work on what matters.
I'm surprised you consider it a lot of energy spent, I tend not to spend any on this, it just runs automatically on my code and I drop out of pretty much every discussions about linting as it's good enough with automated tools.
I also used to work in places where there was no such tools, and there I had to actually spend time discussing and thinking about linting.
Edit: one could also use single or double quotes in strings, and it didn't anger the grammar nazi bots as there were none.
That's why I like Go, every piece of code looks the same, there's one default enforced linter and this discussion (or discussion if discussion should be allowed or prohibited) doesn't even cross anyones mind.
However since you've asked so nicely here you go: everybody’s code looking different is because all humans are different. It's what makes us human. I am very serious about my craftsmanship, and I bring my "humanity" to it: sometimes I include a cultural reference (as in the example above), or an internal joke in the name of a (very long) variable, or vent my frustration in a comment.
My first ten years of writing Python were uneventful; nobody commented about my style and I never commented about others'. With the advent of grammar nazi bots, everyone is supposed to now please them by writing completely bland code, which in my opinion degrades me from a craftsman to a code-monkey. This is dehumanising, in a certain sense.
I care how the food tastes, not that the chef has a really cool Japanese knife and is really fast at cutting onions.
Now imagine a chef who has a nice little restaurant but is now being sent a couple of "quality assurance" guys from McDonald's who tell him that his choice of potato variety for chips does not exactly conform to the "standards" defined at the mothership.
That's not true, and if anything in software having consistent software delivery makes it more likely to achieve Michelin-graded level of quality, not less.
Software shouldn't be bespoke and "artisan".
The bigger problem is this: you want me to be a cog wheel, but I want to be an artist.
If sieving the spam from ham in code reviews is your thing, go have fun.
I personally prefer code that is automatically and unconditionally kept in the exact same shape, preserving only the intended changes to stop the team from wasting time on formatting or reviewing.
Having a single tool that runs before committing, ideally as a git hook, ensures a single, uniform style across all files touched.
Compare that with other languages where you need to load a different set of prettier rules, code formatting tools and follow contribution guidelines on how things should look like depending on the opinion of the maintainers.
I remember people saying this exact same thing about Python ~20 years ago.
Python was designed from the start so that 'foo' and "foo" are equal. It also worked like that for 30 years or so. This has not been an issue in these 30 years. But then someone came with an opinion that one of them is better than the other.
Add a look-behind for '[' and a look-ahead for ']' and you'll be fine.
Afterwards it will affect production code everywhere on the planet. :)
Tokens are burnt, that's the most important part. And with more of the generated shitty code there will be more tokens spent in the future.
Pretend they don’t exist as much as you’d like, tell everyone their lived experience is wrong, that the tools arose from delusion and not any real world need, and that they benefit no one.
I’ll keep using them though, and never suffer from someone writing typescript with 4 spaces, leading commas, and no semicolons again.
(I think that in their case it was partially because uniformity made correcting faster.)
Worse, sometimes you would start working on a project without having that discussion first, only to discover a few days later that the code was failing because different people had different indentation settings in their IDEs, both regarding tabs versus spaces and the number of spaces. You would then have to pause the work, go back, have the discussion, and decide who was going to fix all the code committed so far.
This only stopped when linters became popular. They may be a little like vaccines: when they work, you do not see them working, so it is easy to forget what things were like before. But believe me, when they appeared, they were a breath of fresh air. We could finally focus on discussing the work rather than the conventions.
And tabs versus spaces is only one example. There used to be PR discussions about countless style issues throughout the entire lifetime of a project. That was not entirely unreasonable, because a consistent style genuinely makes a project easier to work on. But when every individual convention has to be negotiated by humans, it takes enormous amounts of energy and becomes tedious very quickly.
I can believe the latter, and I can assure you this was a Big Deal back in the day. There's a reason Go ships with gofmt, and gofmt was somewhat revolutionary for being a built-in "you gotta do it like this" back in the day.
In short, you seem to have a grievance against linters that goes way past reasonable. You assert this example you give is "perfect" below. You also complain linters waste time and commits despite able evidence in the field they do the opposite.
You seem willing to add drama, grievance, and personal bias to what could have been a rather straightforward technical discussion. The sum of which is: linters sometimes make changes to code that I don't like.
I'd encourage you to reconsider what's really important when it comes to team development and try listening more to those around you. You seem overly focused on asserting your opinion instead of having a discussion.
These types of exchanges are usually very unproductive and stressful in a team environment. They are evidence, IMO, of a dev having the wrong priorities. I'd encourage you to step back and really consider how you view craftsmanship in a team dynamic and whether or not you are fighting the right battles.
100%. Almost all of my time burned navigating code is not hung up on stylistic conventions but on nasty services with inconsistent abstractions and patterns.
BUT, conventions and consistency make code easier to read and write, period. If you’re debating over single or double quotes that’s almost a fireable offense IMO.
Additionally, when you have a culture that delegates to tools as much as possible, the focus sharpens in a healthy way.
Taking that as a reason to not have those rules in the first place seems like a logical fallacy that intelligent people should not make.
Another option would be to leave both topics alone and go on with our lives, improving the product, fixing bugs, implementing new features, and generally giving customers a better product and shareholders more value, while respectfully agreeing to disagree on the issues of style.
That is why gofmt is so great. As the saying goes: gofmt’s style is nobody’s favorite, yet gofmt is everybody’s favorite.
It boggles me that anyone would argue against standardization, or believe that “just get hundreds of people to agree today and tomorrow and every future day” is a better solution.
This seems like a case where the tooling is compensating for unclear conventions. Collaboration tools are useful, but it may be more effective to strengthen the code specifications and documentation practices first, so intent lives in a predictable place instead of being scattered through implementation details.
I find that people who argue against automatic linting and formatting tend to be the same that would argue incessantly about style. So much wasted energy, I want none of that.
Also, in your example above, if you put the comment on the line _above_ instead of inline the formatter will most likely do the right thing.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
By the way, you have the exact energy of someone who would argue about code style: a prima donna who quotes Emerson when confronted with disagreement.
In my first ten years of writing Python, I never argued about code style with anyone. It's only after they brought the bots in that I learned that my style is somehow "bad."
> I learned that my style is somehow "bad."
That’s what you are missing: your style is not bad at all. It’s just your style. Use it for yourself!
Teams work on shared ground. Automatic formatting is just part of that shared ground.
But one thing I bring to every team is this: “I don’t want to look at a file and say that is Tom’s code or that is your code. What I want to see is [project name] code.”
I also need something to save me from my regexps, the verbose flag helps a lot. but what would be really nice is some sort of python subset that could compile to the state machine. I would also like composable expressions, that is, composable at the graph level not the string composition we are forced to use. And a pony, I would also like a pony.
As you can tell I am not a fan of APL, not because of what it can do but because of the super compressed syntax it adopts. see also: perl
I’m also not sure I understand the “ My place used pylint, flake8, black, ruff -- with hundreds of commits on every change”. These tools don’t add extra commits. You run them prior to your PR, get them aligned with the linting, and then commit the change you were already going to make. Thats 0 extra commits.
For someone ultimately arguing that there is too much effort spent on people’s coding styles, you are spending a lot of effort arguing about people’s coding styles. These tools are some of the most set it and forget it things around.
When you replace tool x with tool y, you need to fix your code, because these tools do not agree on what your code should look like, and what was acceptable for tool x simply isn't for tool y.
One of these changes I mentioned brought a massive reformatting of all code base, as the new tool failed 'import' statements unless they were in alphabetical order.
I’m aware we could have an allowlist in place which specifies all rules that are turned on but I’d much rather have a simpler config file, and be able to bump the state version at a good time for everyone to spend a few hours fixing new violations.
It is fairly new so not well known but it is what powers go fix and go vet under the hood. And I believe the Go team is currently working on making it possible for module authors to easily describe their own custom analysis passes that would run automatically when running go fix.
It is extremely easy to define your own analysis.Analyzer struct that describes your own static analysis pass. You get access to all sorts of useful information such as the AST, types, even SSA info and you can even compose the information between analyzers. Then you can easily compile it into a binary and run it by passing that binary to go fix with a command line flag. The go toolchain itself handles all the complex caching logic so that your analyzers run fast.
Since it is made by the go team itself and part of the toolchain it should slowly become the unified standard you are looking for. So hopefully golangci-lint and others should eventually all unify under this framework.
You can easily give it a go by telling some AI agent to write some Go Analysis analyzers and telling them to drive them with go fix. My Go projects tend to accumulate a bunch of these to enforce all sorts of rules deterministically and automatically instead of some imprecise markdown file.
Gofmt is great but it's still not very strict, the amount of times my colleagues have argued about formatting in Go is still too great, stuff like consts, types, funcs, methods order, struct initialziation newlines and other details that do matter, but they should be decided one and then applied everywhere like that.
Granted, this is a linter, not a formatter, but my larger point is I am glad that Python ecosystem evolved like it did recently.
Go can get there, but like I said, I think everyone is building some partial tools that solve some problems, but there is not that one player building that one great tool.
Compare that to Python or TypeScript which are Wild West languages without opinionated first-party tooling, and it’s clear why Ruff/Biome feel great.
You just wouldn’t get that same high with Go.
Gofmt is a great idea but it isn't strict enough for my taste. Go does not have any first party static analyzers, closest is Staticcheck which is even sponsored by Google themselves
(Honestly go's distributing itself has covered a lot of it)
Not sure what you're talking about.
That's not the fault of golangci-lint, it's just the concept of bringing together a bunch of different linters and keeping it fast is impossible. And the configuration is a bit wild too, because every linter obviously has their own decisions on how it wants to be configured.
Ruff can lint in seconds or even sub second.
https://github.com/gempir/strider
It's definitely possible, if Google would put like one or two smart minds on the problem full time they could easily solve this problem and make the ecosystem so much stronger. But I'm guessing they already have something like this in-house and no interest in open sourcing it.
Not unlike that experience, I also saw coding agents spend lots of tokens trying to fix a benign issue, as well as doing the opposite - like disabling the tests !!! when they don't pass. :facepalm:
I grew to trust AI results in terms of overall correctness, but I still have hard time trusting their *judgement* on the *code quality*.
Don't get me wrong, the new level of details coming from Ruff is much appreciated and a good thing :)
Generally gets you 90% there.
Good thing we have LLM:s that can do the tedious work of checking each case and applying local annotations or updating the config globally! If I was stuck doing this manually, I would have just gotten rid of ruff and went back to black+pylint.
line-length = 300It's really annoying how many people think that if you enforce stupidly strict rules about formatting, more strict that those of Fortran in 70s, you'll automatically get good code.
I've seen companies that enable 100% of ruff rules, use several other linters, and enforce other rules (like every variable name should be at least 20 characters long to fully describe its purpose). And they have awful buggy unmaintainable code. But it is nicely formatted (although reading code where half of the screen estate is consumed by the variable name is a bit difficult) and has no "dreadful" `except Exception`. Or every mutable class attribute variable is annotated with `typing.ClassVar` (RUF012 - the most idiotic rule I've ever seen). Nevermind that it doesn't really stop anyone from changing value of that attribute. You must annotate it with `ClassVar`!
It's an idiotic cargo-cult.
Ruff v0.16 has a small number of breaking changes
I sorta kinda get why `ty` is pre v1.0.0 -- it's a typechecker that doesn't check a huge number of types. But what are we waiting for with `ruff`? Surely it's eaten whatever the old options were (black? maybe a few takes on py+lint?) by now many times over, and is even more dominant than `uv`.
I run this program hundreds of times a day so I'm generally excited for new features, but I guess the OAI acquisition has made me ornery when it comes to these folks. Apologies to kindly nerds who made this release happen, and congrats <3
It is fully according to their versioning policy:
https://docs.astral.sh/ruff/versioning/
But also compliant with semver:
Major version zero (0.y.z) is for initial development. Anything MAY change at any time. The public API SHOULD NOT be considered stable.
(Maybe I misinterpreted your remark, but semver does not get hurt.)
What's really tiring is reading such facile "critiques", especially when they are not even applicable.