by babel_ | 2025-09-08 23:49:55+00:00
The blog post, in its opening section, directly points out:

> Everyone had their own pretty-printing settings for viewing it however they wanted

This is an example of how treating storage and presentation as two separate concerns obviates a large swathe of low-value yet high-friction concerns with current "draw it as you store it" plain text code.

>> It did not object to the presence of mechanically-enforced style rules

Quite the opposite, by my reckoning! I won't belabour the dissonance about "linter enforced" somehow not being "mechanically enforced", since I think that merely belies a different interpretation of those words to have a subtle difference I feel adds nothing to the conversation. Instead, note the prior quote, which is quite literally from the leading section, as pointing out how you don't have "mechanically enforced" rules in such a scheme as the blog suggests. In particular, by letting someone views code "however they wanted", in other words, we're not merely talking indentation or casing, we're talking about using code to present the code, potentially in a contextually relevant manner.

This is, in my mind, quite the opposite of mechanically enforcing a set of style rules, since that would result in a fixed, static presentation, akin to merely "what flavour of indentation do you like"... here, we see the idea of contextually presenting the code as per your current needs and wants, for example, to directly craft the "one-off" not as an exception to the norm, i.e. "please turn off for these lines so you don't disrupt the formatting or trip on a bunch of special cases", but rather as a "here's how you should present this specific thing" in a way that is at the heart of this entire endeavour in the first place: programming the logic to get the intended results, now simply reflected back upon the task of programming itself (and for arguably the most important part, reading the code). By establishing these "rules" and patterns, it focuses the task on how to make the code more readable as a direct consequence of considering how to present and format it, with the ability to handle the special cases in that "one-off" manner with simple hard-coded patterns (i.e. "when the code is like this, present it exactly like that"), but of course also accumulating and generalising to handle even more cases, only now able to perform the delicate, "hand-crafted" formatting on code you're only just looking at for the first time, finding that it is now already formatted exactly how you needed it, or can be switched to another contextual mode easily with a quick addition to a set of such places to activate it, or a direct command to present it in such a way regardless.

Likewise, nowhere did the article state that this could not be shared, as people are often wont to do. The blog doesn't even talk about what people are currently getting up to with similar ideas now, with a little more rendering capability than the 1980s could reasonably provide. So, this hardly seems like glorification, even when it discusses not having to waste time debating linter/autoformat settings with one another. Indeed, it holds back from mentioning what can be done with some of the ideas it so casually includes, such as live environments (think about it, the presentation reflecting the current meaning, semantics, values, or state of the code as it runs, or while testing/debugging! that's something we currently either lack in most editors/IDEs, or are relegated to perhaps some basic syntax highlighting changes) or some of the interesting ways some "refactors" are actually entirely superficial and can be reframed as presentational changes since they do not alter the underlying semantics (or literal IR), such as "what order should these variables be declared in?" and other similarly banal or indeed perhaps more serious and useful presentational shifts we could explore with better tools (such as exploring "order-of-operations" sequencing in the "business logic" for edge-cases or to improve clarity, finding equivalent but more intelligible database queries without impacting optimisation, etc) without the need for worrying how entirely superficial changes might need a meeting to decide how to handle merges because two people renamed the same function or its arguments or similar clashes that are completely brittle right now.

The current tooling, particularly the use of linters and similar static analysis for auto-formatting, is based on a compromise with the underlying conceit that the storage medium and the presentation must be mechanically connected with little room for alteration (I still see people claiming syntax highlighting is tantamount to sin, unironically, so the extreme positions here are alive and well, thankfully barring calls to magnetised needles) and that the form is given primacy over the function, syntax over semantics, which continues to bring in pointless discrepancies over what that form/syntax should be, precisely because we can and should disagree since our own needs and tastes are individual, yet are forced to come to some compromise purely for the sake of having some consistent, canonical form that will be presented identically on everyone's screen baring only editor/IDE level differences such as syntax highlighting, themes, fonts, or indentation. Those are perhaps the most superficial changes to presentation and formatting that could be made, yet they are the only one most code and editors "allows" the user to have control over so they can customise it to their own needs, perhaps even going so far as to quickly switch them up with shortcuts or commands.

Now, with that in mind, we reflect on the blog, and on the use of some canonical storage of code (minified code, IR, or simply language-specific canonical formatting) with the explicitly non-canonical presentation, alleviating the concerns about people disagreeing over how to format a 2D array or something similarly innocuous, since they are all free to format it exactly however they please, either with a more manual "pushing syntax around" approach akin to moving characters/symbols in an editor, or programmatically extending from "pretty printing" into a rich, contextual and dynamic approach, which you as the programmer are free to configure to meet your exact needs.

Does that sound like a glorification of "mechanically enforced" style rules? Like it's destroying the signal rather than trying to expose and even amplify it? Like there is no room for us humans to craft and refine how something is presented to make it more intelligible and understandable? I hope not. Because, by my reckoning, this blog and the ideas it's discussing are perhaps one of the few directions we could reasonably and understandably start down to resolve the issues you, I, and the blogger are all agreeing on here, and with clear historical precedent to show it's not only achievable, but that it was achievable with only a fraction of the hardware and understanding widely available today. The "subtext" here feels quite contrary to how you are presenting it, though assuming such a "subtext" would indeed make the blog less coherent due to the continued cognitive dissonance of assuming the blog is suggesting "take away autoformatting/linting and then add it back in by a different name", instead of the really quite significant change it's actually suggesting we can do... and, indeed, wouldn't even have to change much these days to achieve it, with canonical or even somewhat minified code being perfectly acceptable for a line-oriented VCS to handle, without needing to figure out a suitable textual representation for the IR or otherwise needing to handle a dedicated binary/wire format.

Oh, and FWIW, to your FWIW, I felt it was the correct way to approach the comment, given that the substance of the blog post was not reflected in a comment that focused entirely on "formatting code" as in the title, in such a way that could be composed wholesale by riffing solely on the title. No direct reference or allusions to specific points in the blog were made, nor anything about what the blog actually suggests that directly supports your comment. Because, FWIW to my own FWIW, I actually agreed with the bulk of your comment, but I also felt the underlying position of said comment was only being presented in this way because you had not read through the blog post, and instead jumped straight in off the title alone, since, again, I felt nothing in the comment connected to the post beyond its title. Formatting is critical, which is why we should not rely on a static, mechanically fixed view of the world/code, and certainly not one decreed by "senior leads of sprints past" (or whatever the authority or popularity we are deferring to is on a given project or Tuesday). "Formatting" as a direct, mechanical act enforced either by a human at a keyboard pushing characters around, or by a linter following a style guide, is something that indeed "should" be "unnecessary", to elevate "formatting" (presentation) and make it a clear and important part of how we prepare code and make it more amenable to reading and understanding for our wetware, rather than convenient for fragile and lazy software. Why would we compromise on this now, when it could already be done in the 80s, and rely on static, linter enforced style rules at a time when we have so many cycles to spare on rendering code that we often render it in a web browser for the sake of "portability" (a huge irony given the origins of linters), and need not waste our time arguing over presentation when we could be making the presentations more useful to ourselves without concern for making it less useful for others, and then getting on with the actual task at hand? To me, this blog is all about elevating and prioritising formatting, without stamping on anyone's toes.

Still, to each their own. Oh, but that was kinda the point of the blog...