D pullrequest review process rant

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On 05/09/2013 10:48 AM, Russel Winder wrote:
> I have to admit the thing I really like about Go is the insistence on
> using tab character for leading indent. Now that I have discovered how
> to make tab display as 2 spaces instead of 8, I really like the lack of
> discussion about how many leading spaces per indent level in the source
> code. I would really like Python to have followed this rule.

I admit to liking "tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment":
http://www.emacswiki.org/SmartTabs

... though I actually use Vi rather than Emacs to get it.  So that's clearly at
least two counts on which I deserve to die. :-)

> Of course then you can bikeshed about whether the { goes on the end of
> the line or on the next line.  Clearly the only sane place is the end of
> the line, but many people hate that. And hate leads to suffering.

Don't know quite why, but I wound up quite liking the rule that Linus Torvalds
suggested, which I think comes from K&R -- separate-line { for the opening of a
function, same-line { for if(), while() statements and so on.

> The positive lesson from Go is that application of one, and only one,
> formatting style, backed up by a tool incorporated into the compiler,
> does lead to the avoidance of bikeshedding and to community peace — just
> not world peace.  

Does it not make debugging a pain sometimes?  I'm fairly sure there are times
when commenting out bits of code for debug purposes, I've in the process left
other parts with incorrect indentation etc.