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Just give me an opinionated ${LANG}fmt utility to do it for me so I don't have to care and don't have to waste time arguing with other zealots. Let the tool be the zealot.


This is exactly how I feel, as someone who has been coding for 22 years (professionally, closer to 32 if you count when I started hacking in BASIC and 6510 assembly on the C64).

I just defer to the code formatter. That way everything is consistent looking internally, which is all I care about. I couldn't care less whether the braces are on the same or a different line or other things like that outside of the fact that I do like internal consistency within projects.

All that aside, as soon as I saw the OP title I knew (via years of exposure to bikeshedding programmers) that this thread would end up having a ton of comments on it and wasn't surprised to see it was up to 500-something and still rapidly climbing.


> Just give me an opinionated ${LANG}fmt utility to do it for me so I don't have to care and don't have to waste time arguing with other zealots. Let the tool be the zealot.

So totally this. I despise indenting with tabs with a passion, but when I heard gofmt did that I was actually pleased. There's no arguing with the official formatting utility: https://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#formatting




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