To use the Go language's formatter and a saying, "Gofmt's style is no one's favorite, yet gofmt is everyone's favorite." That is, you may not like the style, but it's preferable over having no tool ensuring consistent style.
Agreed, but that's a different conversation because gofmt is a lot less opinionated than prettier. Prettier goes well beyond style issues, and messes with semantics - it will add or remove parentheses in math expressions, add or remove linebreaks within lines of code, etc.
If prettier worked more like gofmt I'd probably love it and have no complaints!
No, by semantic information I mean information that's meaningful to humans but not to the JS engine. E.g.:
// before prettier
var matrix = [
1, 0, 0,
0, 1, 0,
0, 0, 1,
]
var result = (num % divisor) | bitmask
// after
var matrix = [1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1]
var result = num % divisor | bitmask
No difference in actual behavior, but the linebreaks and extra parens were there to indicate the developer's intent, not to affect behavior.
Prettier's outlook is that this is intentional, and the developer should add "// prettier-ignore" comments to every line of code that has semantic information they want preserved.
I've never seen it be buggy, but it will often remove unnecessary parens. For example: (a * b) + (x * y) becomes a * b + x * y.
This the same code, but I often use parens for semantic grouping or to be 110% sure the operator precedence is correct for a particular formula. It's not a dealbreaker, but it does remove some of the meaning I was trying to imbue on the code.
