> Good programmers gravitate towards shorter lines of code by nature. If your average line of code is wider than 80 characters, it's likely you have some other, bigger coding style problems which need to be addressed.
This kind of thing is really obtuse and it drives me insane that so many people subscribe to ideas like these.
This kind of thinking is what leads to linters with completely arbitrary rules telling me how I should solve my own problem.
Me: "Hey linter, I'm going to shadow a variable name here, because that's the right thing to do in this situation, so shut up about it."
Linter, and 5 billion HN commenters: "you're shadowing a variable. Compile warning."
Me: "it's a language feature, and it's ok to use."
Linter: "you're shadowing a variable. Compile warning."
Etc.
Arbitrary rules like line width (and I assure you, those rules ARE arbitrary) help exactly 0 people per day, and cause problems for more than 0 people per day.
I PROMISE that a human brain is better at discovering general code quality problems than the best linter with the best rules, and that will be true until a time when every reasonable computer is a general purpose AI.
Yes, tell me when I have a memory leak. Use static analysis to tell me about weird issues I have difficulty seeing. I know best about line width and how to solve things in my own application better than any linter could ever hope to, because linters do not have anything approximating the intelligence of gnat, nevermind a human being.
> Arbitrary rules like line width (and I assure you, those rules ARE arbitrary) help exactly 0 people per day, and cause problems for more than 0 people per day.
Linters' line length rules solve a problem of useless bikeshedding and introduce consistence to the code. This already helps everyone involved in reading and writing the code.
If people were interested in stopping the bikeshedding, they would create an editor that let everyone view the code however they please, and check in with a consistent format that doesn't matter. Extensions for source control tools and debuggers would quickly point to the token that caused an issue, for example, rather than the line number.
Instead everyone just creates rules that they like, then force those rules on everyone else as a power move, then use "this is for consistency and anti-bikeshedding" as an excuse to keep their own preferences enforced on others.
And before anyone argues, I've seen it happen multiple times. I swear people become team leads solely to force their preferences on others. They certainly are fond of power trips, in my experience.
> Arbitrary rules like line width help exactly 0 people per day
I use a linter, it warns about long lines (adjusted to 100), so I reformat or split them and the code seems more readable. Also, it has consistent formatting (other rules), though I occasionally mark some lines to be ignored.
I'd say it helps me, which is >0 people. You don't have to follow norms and/or best practices, but some find it useful.
> Arbitrary rules like line width (and I assure you, those rules ARE arbitrary) help exactly 0 people per day, and cause problems for more than 0 people per day.
I have no idea why you think I am arguing for stuffing arbitrary line lengths in code. I was arguing for the exact opposite, that line length limits are rarely beneficial.
I am skeptical but curious. I honestly can't think of one. The closest one I can think is maybe you have some kind of macro that uses a temp variable? like a swap macro? But i think you can still have a unique variable name for that particular line if you want?
But if these cases are exceptional then you can use pragma to suppress those warnings for that particular block of code. If they are not exceptional perhaps you shouldn't have enable the warning/linter check for that warning.
But honestly I can't think a good reason for shadowing variables and would appreciate an example
This kind of thing is really obtuse and it drives me insane that so many people subscribe to ideas like these.
This kind of thinking is what leads to linters with completely arbitrary rules telling me how I should solve my own problem.
Me: "Hey linter, I'm going to shadow a variable name here, because that's the right thing to do in this situation, so shut up about it."
Linter, and 5 billion HN commenters: "you're shadowing a variable. Compile warning."
Me: "it's a language feature, and it's ok to use."
Linter: "you're shadowing a variable. Compile warning."
Etc.
Arbitrary rules like line width (and I assure you, those rules ARE arbitrary) help exactly 0 people per day, and cause problems for more than 0 people per day.
I PROMISE that a human brain is better at discovering general code quality problems than the best linter with the best rules, and that will be true until a time when every reasonable computer is a general purpose AI.
Yes, tell me when I have a memory leak. Use static analysis to tell me about weird issues I have difficulty seeing. I know best about line width and how to solve things in my own application better than any linter could ever hope to, because linters do not have anything approximating the intelligence of gnat, nevermind a human being.