[adiabatty]

To be fair to GvR, autoformatters weren’t commonplace in the late 80s and early 90s. Were there even any?

Ever since Go got big, though, everyone else is discovering how fantastically nice they are, and that’s a good thing.

[mdasen]

Yea, in the 90s significant whitespace seemed great because it meant that you got readable code. The amount of code that you might see copy/pasted with terrible formatting/indentation in other languages could make you want to scream.

Now, when you paste code and things are wrong, an auto formatter cleans it up for you. Before, you'd just end up with an unreadable codebase.

It's definitely an odd choice to make now.

[cb321]

GNU indent was already at version 1.9.1 by 1994: https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/indent/

If you grab that version and unpack it and look at /OChangelog then it seems to date back until at least 1989, same as Python itself.

That was for C source, of course. I expect there were pre-GNU indent variants, perhaps posted on comp.sources.unix and maybe some commercial things as part of very expensive compiler packages.

I would say that running autoformatters in any kind of routine way was pretty rare. EDIT: but I think ascribing the language design to commonality or not is probably ahistorical. Even today it's a rather passionate debate. And even at the time, Lisp - the poster child of copy-paste friendly PLangs - was routinely autoformatted within Emacs', but that was not enough for people to not find Lisp code "ugly".

[jibal]

While formatters for non-C languages may have existed, no auto formatters existed. And yes, this discussion is completely ahistorical.