On 12/20/2013 12:11 AM, Ehsan Akhgari wrote:
On 12/19/2013, 12:57 PM, Till Schneidereit wrote:
I think we should do more than encourage: we should back out for all
style guide violations. Period. We could even enforce that during upload
to a review tool, perhaps.
However. This has to be done on a per-module basis (or even more
fine-grained: different parts of, e.g., SpiderMonkey have slightly
different styles). Different modules have vastly different styles,
ranging from where to put braces over how much to indent to how to name
fields/ vars/ arguments. I very, very much doubt we'll ever be able to
reconcile these differences. (Partly because some of the affected people
from different modules sit in the same offices, and would probably get
into fist fights.)
See, that right there is the root problem! Programmers tend to care too much
about their favorite styles. I used to be like that but over the years
I've mostly stopped caring about which style is better, and what I want now is
consistency,
Exactly. We need consistency since that leads to easier-to-read code. And that is why we have
https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Mozilla_Coding_Style_Guide and that is what DOM (C++) is following in new code.
(Except for some strange reason webidl bindings use odd mix of js and normal
DOM style)
even if the code looks ugly to *me*. The projects which
enforce a unified style guideline have this huge benefit that their code looks
clean and consistent, as if it was all written by the same person. But
letting each module enforce its own rules leads to the kind of code base which
we have now where you get a completely different style depending on
which directory and file you're looking at. I think trying to enforce this
kind of inconsistency with tools is strictly worse than what we have today.
If we stepped back for a second and agreed to put aside our personal
preferences and value consistency more, we could use tools to enforce the style
guidelines and we'd end up where other code bases that have done this are right
now.
That all being said, I'm sure there are people who don't value consistency as
much as I do and are more interested to have the code they work on the
most look beautiful to them. I think these two camps are at odds with each other and so
far the latter camp has "won" this battle. :/
Cheers,
Ehsan
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