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Comment by chowells

You've jumped to a fascinatingly false conclusion here. Is this the so-called death of media literacy? I replied to the ideas underlying the post rather than the words in it, and you think that means I didn't read it?

To go through the details: The post explicitly complained about a linter enforcing style rules. It did not object to the presence of mechanically-enforced style rules. In fact, it glorified them implicitly by saying how great it would be if everything was formatted at presentation-time. This glorification is the exact thing I was criticizing.

I think machine-enforced rules are bad because they destroy a communication channel that importantly has point 4 that I listed - when well-formatted code breaks its conventions, there must be a reason for it. That is important information that enforced presentation rules force to be put into another channel.

And it's certainly true that other channels do convey this other information, but I find more value in having it conveyed in the presentation channel than I do in having that channel replaced by mechanistic formatting.

This is the premise underlying the article that I object to. It is present so heavily in the subtext that if you pretend it's not, the post becomes incoherent.

And FWIW, HN rules say not to accuse people of not having read the article. I think that rule is mostly there because someone can read the article and notice something you missed, and it's wiser to not post than it is to assume you absorbed 100% of the context of the post.

parent chowells 1 year ago

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