Ask HN: Examples of Unusual Code Formatting Styles?

17 points by happyrock 4 years ago | 21 comments

The recent discussion [1] on the Black formatter for Python had me thinking about whether there is any innovation still happening in the realm of code formatting. Most of the possible ways to format code in each language must have been tried by now, and I would expect we've converged on a narrow range of permutations purely for practical reasons. But recently I did see an interesting example [2] of Java formatting from the Boot library for Clojure, with a style that I had never seen before in that language.

Are there other major variants of code formatting style still being developed out there?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30130315

[2] https://github.com/boot-clj/boot/blob/master/boot/base/src/main/java/boot/App.java

iamthad 4 years ago |

I find the Horstmann indentation style [1], in which code is placed on the same line as the opening bracket, simultaneously disturbing and compelling. If it ever ends up added to clang-format as has been requested [2], it might become more popular.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentation_style#Horstmann_st... [2] https://bugs.llvm.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27263

adamhp 4 years ago | |

It is fascinating that we've developed a sense of aesthetics around this, though I suppose it is to be expected with how much we are oriented around language.

I personally use 1TBS wherever possible. It just looks the cleanest to me.

pkulak 4 years ago | |

Oh my God, I think I like it.

muzani 4 years ago | |

This is actually very sensible. I don't like the top bracket being its own line, but there's good reason for it to align with the bottom bracket.

videogreg93 4 years ago | | |

Java style formatting removes the "bracket on its own line" problem, so I'm not sure how this new indentation style adds anything of value really.

mikewarot 4 years ago | |

I like it too. It makes C code actually look readable. It would be interesting to see it applied to Lisp code.

Rendello 4 years ago |

Two come to mind off the bat:

GNU C formatting is odd: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_coding_standards

Zlib still uses K&R-1st-edition-era function definitions: https://github.com/madler/zlib/blob/cacf7f1d4e3d44d871b605da...

Someone 4 years ago |

https://github.com/boot-clj/boot/blob/master/boot/base/src/m... looks like the gnu standard for C (https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#Formatting), applied to Java.

I think that was done to make grepping for function definitions easier (when searching for the definition of foo, grep for “^foo\b”. That makes implementing “go to function definition” possible without having to parse code)

mikewarot 4 years ago |

Code formatting is all about matching the impedance of the source code to that of the human author/readers of the code. The development of literature suggest that innovation in this area will continue for a very long time.

I myself am a huge fan of Pascal, and limiting code to one function per line. I find that clever/terse code is unmaintainable code.

Here's some code I wrote back in 1991 for a TECO clone that reflects that style. Looking back, I think some things could have a few more comments, but it seems fairly easy to read the intent of the code.

https://github.com/mikewarot/teco

twistedpair 4 years ago |

Historically it was common advice to avoid elaborate code formatting, as keeping up such formatting by hand was tedious, time consuming, and inconsistent, compared to the value add.

Given near all code (let's say for large projects) is authored with IDEs, elaborate formats can be applied consistently and automatically, at little or no cognitive or typing cost.

To me the question is then if such formatting can increase the legibility of the code. The grid of static variable declarations in [2] is nice, but I wonder if sorting the variable lexicographically would make it easier to read/find a var by name?

Not sure how splitting method signature names onto a second line helps, though.

mtve 4 years ago |

APL/J/K C-sources (perhaps by Roger Hui): https://github.com/jsoftware/jsource/blob/master/jsrc/a.c and other *.c files

Niklaus Wirth, Verilog: http://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/FPGA-relatedWork/RS232R.v

all of ioccc)

muzani 4 years ago |

I like Google's HTML style where they don't close some tags </li> and omit optional tags like <html> and <body>

Example:

    <!-- Recommended -->
    <!DOCTYPE html>
    <title>Saving money, saving bytes</title>
    <p>Qed.

https://google.github.io/styleguide/htmlcssguide.html#HTML_F...

isbvhodnvemrwvn 4 years ago | |

Disgusting. I bet the person who came up with it doesn't close their parentheses.

netizen-936824 4 years ago | | |

Oh no, where will it end

drpixie 4 years ago |

I recall someone (nameless) who tried to teach Pascal by putting the semicolon at the start of every line. It actually works (as the Pascal semicolon is a separator, not a terminator), although you end up with many null/empty statements.

Sound confusing - very. I could see his "logic" but as to teaching programming students ... yes confusion all round, and wait till the poor students move on to any other language #@%%!$#!!!

a9h74j 4 years ago |

I've seen this in the wild and have been meaning to ask:

With the availabily of syntax highlighting including color, has anyone seen merit in skipping indentation altogether?

For that matter, what if block color or font size took the place of indentation (under control of syntax highlighting). I'll have to try it by hand.

muzani 4 years ago | |

Code has evolved towards smaller indentation: 2 spaces instead of 4. We might see 1.

However, we have more async stuff than ever before. Heavy nesting is frequent.

And then you have the weird new imperative UI stuff like Flutter/Jetpack Compose where a simple layout is brackets in brackets in brackets in brackets.

Rainbow brackets are a thing though - one of the most popular plugins in many IDEs is something that highlights different colour brackets.

idiocrat 4 years ago |

If you need some ideas for brainstorming, here is the endless source for inspiration.

https://shitcode.net/

idiocrat 4 years ago | |

Sorry for a series of posts. Here is another one.

https://govnokod.ru/

I mean this seriously, because the people are trying to solve their real problems with the tools available to them. So this has a good educational exercise.

netizen-936824 4 years ago | |

Some of these are hilarious, thank you for sharing

vanusa 4 years ago |

Double-spacing. As in, between every line of code - a blank line.

To make it "less crowded", and allow space for future comments, I was told.