Linters can go to hell

Recently when going through some old notes, I found the following rant, which was clearly written in the fires of righteous fury. I think it's worth publishing, unbaudlerized and raw.

There exists a common tool in software development called a linter, the only purpose of which is to shout at you if you don’t conform to a long list of stylistic requirements. It is my contention that this sort of tool is the sort of self flageleting masochism that only someone brought up without love could appreciate, the sort of unmitigated time-wasting that is only appreciated by the powerless pedant struggling for relevance in a cruel world.

In my opinion, simply wiping these tools from existence, would make the world a better place.

I want to clarify that there is another similar set of tools, that note the stylistic faux pas', and go ahead and fix them automatically for you. These are completely OK in my book. I want to live in a future where the robots assist us in menial labour, rather than chiding us for our miscreances.

You might ask, do I not care about beautiful code? And the short answer is No. The longer answer is No, life is too short to care about such a meaningless thing. Unless the code is formatted egregiously in a way that makes it unreadable, then this bike shedding is only pedantry. And if the code is egregious, then you should just talk to the person who wrote it - delegating interpersonal feedback to a machine is spineless and unkind.

Earlier in my career when I was consumed by the perfectionist passions of youth, I cared about spaces, tabs, lining things up. Those were wasted hours that could have been spent on literally anything else. I mourn their loss.

I had a CI job fail on me today because a config file had a trailing newline. Even in the depths of my naïveté, I could not have cared about such a trivial thing. It’s not like it made the code less readable- it was literally whitespace.

Some assholes' OCD made its way into the default configs of a tool that shouldn’t even exist, and as a result, 5 minutes of my life were wasted. Nothing about that is sane or wise.

It's now years since I wrote this, but I still stand by the content, even if the heat has now subsided.