The problem I see with that is that you can wait for a *very* long time before any consensus emerges. There are simply many choices to be made in that regard which at the end of the day are kind of arbitrary - that *a*choice is made and consistently followed is more important, and again the benefit of autoformatting is that you don't have to waste putting effort into doing so.
Having something something concrete to respond to also helps with the discussion - an autoformatting tool will impose a certain style, which will drive the discussion of standardising proper style. If people disagree with the formatting it provides, great! That means a discussion is triggered. So instead of waiting for a consensus to emerge, I think that building an autoformatting tool with a "good enough first guess" in terms of style would be the place to start. Even if it starts out with terrible style choices otherwise. (is this worth starting a separate discussion on the topic?) On Thursday, 9 January 2014 03:18:05 UTC+1, John Myles White wrote: > > There is not yet, because there is still not a consensus on proper style. > Hopefully once we have that, it will be easier to make a julia fmt tool. > > — John > > On Jan 8, 2014, at 6:09 PM, Job van der Zwan > <[email protected]<javascript:>> > wrote: > > > Depends on what you mean with legibility. > > > > For example (and not at all related to x.f(y) vs f(x, y)), if I look at > my experience with the Go programming language, once you get used to its > imposed One True Way of formatting it really makes reading other people's > source code a lot easier. And talking about spending energy on the subject > of legibility: setting up my editor to use go-fmt (the autoformatting tool) > when building/saving code means I don't have to spend any time thinking > about it when writing my own code either; it will automatically get fixed. > > > > It's one of those things the Go developers are very enthusiastic about, > and at first you go "really? That's a killer feature?" but after using it > you do start to miss it in other languages. > > > > Speaking of which, is there an autoformatting tool for Julia? >
