Hi Daniel,
I think that this is a great idea. I'm a big fan of gofmt, because it has
no options - it prevents any discussion of indentation and instead allows
code-reviews to be focused on the code itself.
Marc
On Tue, 18 Dec 2018 at 20:42, Daniel Compton
wrote:
> Hi folks
>
> In the last ten years or so, source code formatters with limited/no
> configuration have become popular. Go is the most well-known example,
> shipping with gofmt, but there are similar tools in Rust, JavaScript,
> Python, and Elixir.
>
> Clojure and Lisps, in general, have historically allowed very flexible
> formatting of s-expressions. This can aid readability but adds a cognitive
> overhead for readers used to different styles. It can also be challenging
> to match existing source code formatting if you are using a different
> editor to the original author.
>
> *I believe it would be useful for the Clojure community to be able to
> develop (or adopt) a single source-code formatter which is able to format
> Clojure source code to a canonical format.* It seems unlikely that 100%
> (maybe not even 50%) of the community would want such a tool, but I feel
> like there is enough desire for a common formatting tool that this could
> still be valuable.
>
> I've created a discussion thread
> <https://clojureverse.org/t/clj-commons-building-a-formatter-like-gofmt-for-clojure/3240>
> on ClojureVerse about building a Clojure/ClojureScript source code
> formatter as part of CLJ Commons <https://clj-commons.org/>. There are a
> few differences in goals between this tool and the existing ones that
> exist. I go into more detail in the thread, but I'm proposing the creation
> of
>
> * A fairly canonical format for Clojure code, e.g. reindenting code,
> reformatting namespace declarations. A format that has idiomatic opinions.
> * A formatting spec and test suite that multiple different tools and
> editors can implement, not a spec defined by the implementation of a single
> tool.
> * The creation of a reference implementation formatter.
> * A formatter with few (maybe zero?) options
>
> It's possible that 10 years after Clojure's creation, it's going to be too
> difficult for the community to coalesce around a canonical format, and it
> will be necessary to add some configuration options. I'm not really sure,
> which is why I'm asking for community members to join in the discussion.
>
> I realise that I'm touching the third rail
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_rail_of_politics> here, and lots of
> people have strong opinions about formatting. I don't expect that everyone
> would like or want to adopt such a strict formatting tool, and that's
> totally ok! For those of you that *do* like the idea of building/having
> such a tool, please jump in on the discussion on ClojureVerse, and on a
> GitHub repo discussing the different aspects of formatting at
> https://github.com/clj-commons/formatter.
>
> Thanks, Daniel.
>
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