Re:Announcing Rust 1.0 Alpha
by nostrademons on Friday January 09, 2015 @08:37PM
(#8865507)
It focuses developers' attention on the things that really matter - what the code does, and how it does it - by removing how it looks from the equation.
The point of an automatic formatter isn't to make the code look pretty. It's to make the code non-ugly, with as little effort as possible. Obviously, there will be cases where the formatter screws up and writes out something pretty ugly. The point is to train yourself to ignore these, because honestly time spent looking at, angsting over, and fixing bad formatting is about the worst possible use of your development time. Instead you could be thinking about solving a problem that hasn't been solved before, or making the product easier for a user to use, or refactoring semantic issues in the code that trip up developers.
The point of an automatic formatter isn't to make the code look pretty. It's to make the code non-ugly, with as little effort as possible. Obviously, there will be cases where the formatter screws up and writes out something pretty ugly. The point is to train yourself to ignore these, because honestly time spent looking at, angsting over, and fixing bad formatting is about the worst possible use of your development time. Instead you could be thinking about solving a problem that hasn't been solved before, or making the product easier for a user to use, or refactoring semantic issues in the code that trip up developers.