Re:The Hardest Program I've Ever Written (2015)
by marcosdumay on Monday August 21, 2017 @05:30PM
(#15068017)
If you are using it to enforce a formating over a code base, ok a good enough formater will do.
But one of the biggest use cases of a code formater is for understanding bad code. If it can't format bad code, that use case is gone.
Re:The Hardest Program I've Ever Written (2015)
by skybrian on Monday August 21, 2017 @04:32PM
(#15067616)
You're right that "good enough" code formatting is often good enough. On the other hand, a tool that does better formatting in more cases is more likely to be used. Also, sometimes code refactoring is done automatically, so nobody is closely looking at the code.
Automatic code formatters don't need to be perfect or complete; they simply must format good code well. If bad code (as many of the difficult examples were) formats poorly, that's just another reason for people to write better code.