• acron@lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

    It’s always irked me that we operate on “text” files as the basis for software development, rather than some symbolic representation of the code. If I have my preference about layout, and you have yours, why do we have to pick one? We aren’t forced to choose other aesthetics like colour scheme or font, so why layout? Why tabs vs spaces? Why single-line or multi-line? The compiler doesn’t care, it only cares about the symbols.

    I guess you can kind of work around this by, for example, having inbound source code files formatted automatically (e.g. eslint) into your style and then have an outbound file also formatted into the style of whatever the project mandates (assuming they’re different), but this is a bit ick.