Like the others said, Prettier isn't foundational.
That said, it brings in _much_ more value than $1.5k/mo. It has eliminated styling arguments on teams that adopt it. The amount of time saved in PRs/reduction of bikeshedding is very valuable.
It's "foundational" in the sense that it gets 30M weekly `npm install`s which is up 500% from 4 years ago and growing. Js/Ts projects depend on it heavily.
Meh, most devs I've met can format code better than Prettier. Having a consistent set of rules sounds alluring at first, but the issue is that mechanical application is, well, mechanical and therefore dumb.
My personal impression is that the code style bike shedding is a sign of team immaturity. In the more mature teams (composed of more mature persons), I haven't really seen formatting bike shedding.
Those devs _can_, but why should they? Code formatting takes a lot of time - it doesn't matter how skilled of a dev you are - you can only accurately <tab> and <space> so fast.
But the big win for code formatters is fewer decisions. Decision fatigue is real.
What's wrong with the application of e.g. Prettier? Is it wrong enough that it's worth your time to manually format however many thousands of LOC, making countless micro decisions along the way?
It doesn't, really. On larger projects, you read much more code than you write.
Formatting well is not something complex - I basically just format with WebStorm, and only tweak that (mostly line breaks). People (including me) are going to read that code many times, I think it's worth the little effort.
On the opposite, I often have to work hard to make Prettier produce readable code. Like, "how do I need to write this code, so Prettier doesn't mess it up?", which is often difficult / frustrating.
Just because they can, doesn't mean they should; how many comments in your code reviews are about code style?
In mine, it used to be... at least half, because I was anal about code style and consistency and all we had at the time was ESLint, which only did partial code stile.
Nowadays, it's none. If you need to worry about code style in code reviews, use a tool.
I used to be one of those devs, thinking I had the most beautiful coding style.
When I embraced formatters, I started spending so much less time and effort keeping the style "correct" and worrying about how other people on the team format code. I love just hitting save in my editor and having the code formatted without having to fiddle with quotes, wrapping, etc.
With regard to bike-shedding about style, it mostly goes away once a team adopts one of the standard formatters for a given language. That's sort of the whole point.
I work in like ~100-person team without code formatter and it's fine. The age average is ~35.
> Since when did caring about readability equated to bike-shedding and immaturity?
Since never, I didn't claim that. On the contrary, Prettier leads to less readable code than what a human can produce. Bike-shedding is endless bickering about some specific, meaningless thing.
That said, it brings in _much_ more value than $1.5k/mo. It has eliminated styling arguments on teams that adopt it. The amount of time saved in PRs/reduction of bikeshedding is very valuable.