Exceptional coding style

[deadalnix]

On Friday, 18 January 2013 at 07:58:57 UTC, Artur Skawina wrote:
> On 01/18/13 07:45, Mehrdad wrote:
>> On Friday, 18 January 2013 at 05:41:00 UTC, Artur Skawina 
>> wrote:
>>> This is one of the reasons why automatic code formatting is 
>>> such a bad idea.
>> 
>> In what language? In C# it's actually a fantastic idea.
>
> Every language. Not only does it mean that the heuristics 
> mentioned by Walter
> can't be used (which isn't the main problem, as the error rate 
> is way too high),
> but skipping of the manual 
> (re-)formatting-and-verifications-phase actively
> reduces code quality by removing opportunities for extra 
> review, discovery of
> refactoring possibilities and reflection.
> Sane, but badly formatted code is much preferable to bad, but 
> pretty code. The
> former can be easily fixed. Ugly code, that also happens to be 
> bad, will be
> found and fixed as part of that process.
> Auto formatting loses information which makes spotting the 
> truly bad code harder.
>

Believing that one code formatting will inherently be better than 
what a formatted can do is very similar to the assertion often 
heard that code generated by the compiler is worse than hand 
written assembly or many other recurring similar topic coming 
again and again in dev discussion.

It has been shown more than once that you can beat the compiler 
on some carefully selected piece of code, but generally speaking, 
you have not even a small chance to beat it at a program scale or 
when certain optimizations kicks in. Same goes for the formatter.

As a matter of fact, the time you spend formatting can be better 
spent elsewhere, and the consistency you win in the process has 
many benefits : cleaner diffs and easiers merges because you have 
no formatting conflict. The codebase is consistent, and the tool 
can even help you by reformatting confusing stuff is clearer ones.

Not to mention that all refactoring tools suffer badly if you 
don't have a proper formatter : you spent as much time 
reformatting the code than you would have needed to do the 
refactoring itself.