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by ed_balls·7y ago·view on hn ↗
I use black every day. It's pretty good. The hours you save on pointless arguments e.g. ' or " is better as default for strings. I wish it'd come with standard python distribution `python fmt`
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yeah, someone above mentioned that with Go as the example. It's pretty nifty in some cases but think there are two sides to the story. I know folks who write lovely python code everytime. I know others at my gig who even after 3 years are not putting spaces after equals sign (and other PEP/flake8 blunders) and every PR is littered with syntactic errors. The code formatter is brilliant for this case.
I don't think making code written by hacks look like code written by a competent programmer is a good thing.
Making the code more clear to read helps its quality come through. Or its lack thereof.
Nothing stops a reviewer from reformatting the code before reading it (probably using an autoformatter).

But I'm not sure if making the code easier -- and thus faster -- to read is necessarily a good thing. If the brain parses and analyzes the code in parallel, making it harder to parse could give the analyzing process more time and thus make the review more thorough.

Of course, nothing stops a reviewer from being thorough either way. But making it the path of least resistance makes it more likely.