On Saturday, 19 January 2013 at 13:19:36 UTC, Artur Skawina wrote:
(No (or small enough) gain) - (real (tangible) loss) < 0.
If you wonder where the loss comes from, others have mentioned
some sources
in this thread already. I'm just pointing out the lack of gain
and additional
loss components.
Nobody demonstrated anything remotely close to that. You
demonstrated a decorrelation, which is only sufficient to remove
parameter from the equation (here code quality).
Consider several developers that each stick to there own style.
The autoformatter
will take care of things when the upstream pulls their changes,
right? Except,
then they each need to use their own private autoformatters in
order to merge all
upstream changes, which includes re-merging their own work.
Imagine what that does
to the revision history. Now consider how merging work from
coder A by developer B
will work. Then merging the result back, B->A. Then pushing
upstream. And merging
back by every developer.
It should be obvious that any sane use of an autoformatter
would have to be at
the local commit phase. But, then a *checking* tool which
enforces a common style
would be the right solution; an autoformatter would just get in
the way (you'd
have to effectively merge its changes back after every single
commit).
Why do a checking tool would be the right solution ? Why do
manually the work that a machine can do automatically ?
Writing the code properly in the first place is a much better
approach, the
checking tool can catch any mistakes. If there are enough of
them and you almost
always need a mechanical tool to do the fixing, then you are
doing something wrong.
No editor have to show you the code as it is actually foramatted
in the source file. Actually, many don't, like IntelliJ. A
formatter can work both directions.
BTW, if an autoformatter helps you to perform merges, then the
same logic can be
put in the merge tool - making that argument irrelevant.
Which would completely dumb. The only component in the toolchain
that care about formatting is the programmer. It make perfect
sense to put the formatter between the programmer and everything
else in the toolchain.
