> How you choose to add whitespace to your code is not a meaningful outlet for creativity.
I'd like to mildly disagree. Using whitespace to group functionality together in "paragraphs" and aligning the horizontal indentation in the clearest possible way is not too far away from editing a short story to make it flow better.
Earlier today my linter rearranged multiple "key: value" one-liners into two-liners and the end result is both objectively and subjectively worse.
This is why I like when formatters give you some wiggle room in how the rules are applied.
Like, in Prettier, adding a trailing comma to a short list of items will tell the formatter to put each item on it own line, while removing the trailing comma will keep each item in a single line (if the line length is not too long).
I normally just auto-apply `black` to my code, but occasionally I feel the need to have things arranged in a way that is easier to read -- e.g. a list of several dictionaries. In that case, I just put a comment telling it to stop reformatting at the start of the block, and another at the end.
Yeah, it's proto-editing, but with such limited degrees of freedom in the activity your creative options are pretty limited and as time goes on and on the endeavor starts to look like this: https://xkcd.com/915/
Interesting, I can't tell if the comic is about "people will become obsess and develop taste in what they see every day", or "people will develop preferences to separate themselves into groups".
I'd like to mildly disagree. Using whitespace to group functionality together in "paragraphs" and aligning the horizontal indentation in the clearest possible way is not too far away from editing a short story to make it flow better.
Earlier today my linter rearranged multiple "key: value" one-liners into two-liners and the end result is both objectively and subjectively worse.