I agree, in long term, it’s better to get used once and feel at home in any environment.
But Observable is special. It unlocks instant-feedback-loop programming like in worrydream’s dreams. Instant feedback means speed, flow, and visual thinking. It means, commenting a line of code on and off to see how it affects the result is an important part of the workflow. Prettier makes it unreliable sometimes by removing the trailing comma before the commented line:
So when you uncomment the line you also have to go up and add the removed comma. You cannot do this without looking into the cell code, so you cannot keep the focus on the result when you’re switching on and off a line of code.
I’m finding myself fighting with commas because I comment and uncomment parts of code to try things. Wondering, what do you guys think? Maybe, if it’s not just me it’s worth considering changing that rule?
I completely agree and also prefer trailing commas. It’s one of the few frequent annoyances in an otherwise excellent editing experience. If there was a way to tweak the Prettier settings with e.g. a user script using the Tapermonkey Chrome extension, I would do it without hesitation, but I wasn’t able to figure out how…
Maybe we could try and figure out a “preserve trailing commas” solution, I’m not sure if the parser leaves enough information to figure that out or not. Prettier has a philosophy of not offering options on their style choices, but this is one of the few cases where there is actually a configuration option.
While Prettier doesn’t add any new options (and regrets adding most of the existing ones), there’s still quite a few that may be of interest for customization:
I noticed a change recently (a month or two maybe); what was formatted as d => {} is now formatted as (d) => {}. The rationale is explained here Options · Prettier
For me prettier is such a net win that I’ll accept whatever it does (and get used to it).
Glad to see that Prettier adapts and changes the defaults and Observable picks them up.
Maybe the trailingComma rule will be changed too as dev environments shorten feedback loop and thinking by commenting parts of the code becomes possible not only in Observable.
