Things I Learnt The Hard Way - Code Formatting Tools Are Ok, But No Silver Bullet

One thing a team may decide to fix the continuous flux of code style comments in a code review is to use a code formatting tool to auto-format the code. That's ok, but they should never rely on it.

Now yeah, that kinda solves the problem, but there is one small problem: we, humans, are not as flexible to read code as computers are; what is readable by a computer may not be readable by a human. Surely they try to create some heuristics on what is good for human reading, but that doesn't mean it gets right.

Also, unless you start from scratch to use the auto-formatting tool or do a change in all files in one single go, you should never assume it will do a good job.

I've seen tools like this implemented in a commit hook, in a way that the tool would reformat the code just before adding it to the repository. The biggest problem is that, in that team, we didn't run the auto-formatting tool in the whole project before hand, and we also added a coverage tool (that checked the coverage on the changed parts of the file) without every running the coverage tool on everything. The result is that, suddenly, a lot of commits got refused because the auto-formatting tool was changing lines that the developer didn't change (it changed old code) and suddenly the coverage tool noted the missed tests and decided it was no good.

So good, punctual changes were suddenly being blocked 'cause instead of doing the whole thing in a single shot, people decided it was a good idea to let the code evolve till everything fixed itself.

On top of that, some people who were neither in the mood to actually add the tests or worried about style found a way to do the commits without running the hook, so they basically skipped the whole "let's improve our code" and let fuck all.

So, it's ok if you run the auto-formatting tool for yourself, but you need to have the maturity and responsibility to watch yourself and be willing to fix and take responsibility for other people's code when the formatter changes their code.