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Analyzed from 4839 words in the discussion.

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#code#ruff#tools#line#more#rules#should#linters#don#python

Discussion (228 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

nickjj•1 day ago
I updated a ~3k line Python project with this the other day. I was using v0.15.x beforehand. It didn't take too long and the new rules do improve code quality. It caught quite a few things previous versions didn't.

Here's a few commits of changes:

(A whole bunch of manual changes based on its suggestions) https://github.com/nickjj/plutus/commit/9af66d31f98bef841588...

(Re-enable line length) https://github.com/nickjj/plutus/commit/21789f89bbcee37913c1...

(Force _ prefix for unused variables) https://github.com/nickjj/plutus/commit/a272c77b932e1c78558a...

(Auto-corrected by Ruff) https://github.com/nickjj/plutus/commit/6fe69cf88385ebdf9b8c...

maratc•1 day ago
The amount of fascination that people have with these "grammar nazi" bots -- some of them implementing completely arbitrary "rules" and some of them disagreeing with others on what "good" Python code should look like -- doesn't stop to amaze me.

Here's "bad" code:

     important_numbers = {
        'x': 3,
        'y': 42, # Answer to the Ultimate Question!
        'z': 2
    }
Here's what "good" code should look like:

    important_numbers = {"x": 3, "y": 42, "z": 2}  # Answer to the Ultimate Question!
Which completely misses the writer's intent. But did you notice that there are two spaces before the pound now? Also, the quotes are now double because apparently it's somehow more kosher! So much improvement!

The actual problems in the code I work with are not the spaces at the end of line or imports in non-alphabetic order, it's the 10-line list comprehensions that are so long that they're impossible for me to parse. None of these tools catch that. My place used pylint, flake8, black, ruff -- with hundreds of commits on every change. All that energy could be better spent elsewhere.

Majestic121•1 day ago
The point of the "grammar nazi" bots is to focus on the actual problems: if a bot is deciding about linting, you don't have to waste brain power to discuss it in PRs.

It is what it is, everyone gets the same, shut up and work on what matters.

I'm surprised you consider it a lot of energy spent, I tend not to spend any on this, it just runs automatically on my code and I drop out of pretty much every discussions about linting as it's good enough with automated tools.

I also used to work in places where there was no such tools, and there I had to actually spend time discussing and thinking about linting.

maratc•1 day ago
In my previous place, discussions on coding style were forbidden in PRs. It worked just fine.

Edit: one could also use single or double quotes in strings, and it didn't anger the grammar nazi bots as there were none.

dewey•1 day ago
Which gets rid of the discussion, but not the problem coding style rules are supposed to fix: Code looks the same, regardless of who wrote it. That's the whole point of code style guidelines like that as there's no functional reason for them.

That's why I like Go, every piece of code looks the same, there's one default enforced linter and this discussion (or discussion if discussion should be allowed or prohibited) doesn't even cross anyones mind.

CuriouslyC•1 day ago
Using a consistent string delimiter has value: if you search for ['foo'] you will find all instances of the string foo. With inconsistent delimiters, you better have a single canonical 'foo' in your project or you're going to run into problems.
bigmadshoe•1 day ago
I would hate to work on that codebase. We learn to parse code more quickly over years of looking at code written with the same conventions and style. There’s a reason why Google are so serious about following their style guides.
Stitch4223•1 day ago
Even better: if someone feels like the syntax must be different, they can pick it up at a centralized repository with more people that specialize in syntax.

Afterwards it will affect production code everywhere on the planet. :)

bwhmather•1 day ago
This is the way, and why I wrote https://pypi.org/project/ssort/. Unfortunately you need to follow it up with shameless self-promotion or it doesn't work.
qmmmur•about 22 hours ago
And yet, a new argument surfaces about whether or not the linking should take place. Some people just like to argue :)
coldtea•about 23 hours ago
>The point of the "grammar nazi" bots is to focus on the actual problems: if a bot is deciding about linting, you don't have to waste brain power to discuss it in PRs.

And yet, as per the example, the bot force worse linting decisions, and even pushes towards more bugs (e.g. future readers missing the comment intention since it now applies to all 3).

mrbombastic•about 22 hours ago
the claim we are arguing here is not that “linters never make mistakes” it is that “linters are generally beneficial and avoid mostly useless debates we previously spent an inordinate amount of time on” Most linters have an escape hatch for exactly this which is usually a one line disable comment
insanitybit•1 day ago
I've never had discussions about code formatting in PRs, this seems like a made up problem or something that predates my career.
BigTTYGothGF•about 22 hours ago
> something that predates my career

That's because everybody uses linters nowadays, which was the original point.

pdpi•1 day ago
It's not by accident that tabs vs spaces is one of the stereotypical great debates in programming.
microtonal•1 day ago
These used to happen all the time. In one (otherwise great) programming course in university you would even get points subtracted if you did not follow the lecturer's preferred style.

(I think that in their case it was partially because uniformity made correcting faster.)

time0ut•1 day ago
Silicon Valley (the TV show) memed about it with its tabs vs spaces bit. It used to be a thing for sure. It has been a good 10 or 15 years since I had such a discussion. Automated linting and formatting tools largely killed it in my experience.
petesergeant•1 day ago
> this seems like a made up problem or something that predates my career

I can believe the latter, and I can assure you this was a Big Deal back in the day. There's a reason Go ships with gofmt, and gofmt was somewhat revolutionary for being a built-in "you gotta do it like this" back in the day.

storus•about 24 hours ago
Dunno, now the workflow is like agent makes code changes, ruff complains, agent fixes complaints at the cost of code bloat, agent makes a PR, another agent reviews the PR, agent makes changes, PR is approved and merged. Nobody reads PRs anymore with the agentic development velocity.
zx8080•about 24 hours ago
> Nobody reads PRs anymore with the agentic development velocity.

Tokens are burnt, that's the most important part. And with more of the generated shitty code there will be more tokens spent in the future.

rsyring•about 24 hours ago
I've read through all the sub-comments you've left here.

In short, you seem to have a grievance against linters that goes way past reasonable. You assert this example you give is "perfect" below. You also complain linters waste time and commits despite able evidence in the field they do the opposite.

You seem willing to add drama, grievance, and personal bias to what could have been a rather straightforward technical discussion. The sum of which is: linters sometimes make changes to code that I don't like.

I'd encourage you to reconsider what's really important when it comes to team development and try listening more to those around you. You seem overly focused on asserting your opinion instead of having a discussion.

These types of exchanges are usually very unproductive and stressful in a team environment. They are evidence, IMO, of a dev having the wrong priorities. I'd encourage you to step back and really consider how you view craftsmanship in a team dynamic and whether or not you are fighting the right battles.

jeltz•about 19 hours ago
There are some really bad linters out there like Rubocop so if they have had experience with those I get it.
colechristensen•about 23 hours ago
A person just as opinionated as the tool. People who have very strong opinions about formatting in any direction are suspect.
maratc•about 23 hours ago
I do not have any opinion on formatting. My argument is that nobody should.
maratc•about 23 hours ago
My issue with your comment is not that it seems to offer unsolicited psychological advice completely out of the blue; it's that it leaves me with an uncanny feeling that it was written by an LLM.

In a thread where I complain about the de-humanisation of my profession by the bots, the irony of having a bot's psychological advice (and so, de-humanising the discussion too) is not lost on me.

rsyring•about 20 hours ago
If you are really concerned about my being a bot, a quick look at my comment history, going back over a decade, should dispel that concern.

Edit: I once had someone apply for a job and their written communication was pretty caustic. After rejecting their application, I wrote and explained how unprofessional I found their interactions, encouraging them to step back and reconsider how their communication appears from the other side.

To my great surprise, they wrote back and said they had never had anyone give them such feedback and they agreed with my assessment of their interactions. They just had never seen it before. They thanked me for the feedback.

Such interactions are exceedingly rare. But I sometimes offer unsolicited advice on the off chance that said advice can make a difference.

wodenokoto•1 day ago
It’s because you forgot a comma after the last item. If you had kept that the items wouldn’t have been compacted (at least in black, I’ve stopped linking my code because it breaks intends of formatting more often than it helps)
maratc•1 day ago
Sorry, but I did not "forg[e]t a comma after the last item". I intentionally did not put a comma there. The list of the "important numbers" in my example is already complete and perfect, and is not supposed to ever change. I wanted to emphasise this fact by specifically omitting the comma there, in the hope that intelligent people in the future would get this message exactly as I intended for it to be.
cyberrock•1 day ago
I think all of us have worked on code that other people thought was perfect or will never change. Personally I love this rule because it saves me from looking at one extra commit (adding the comma when the next value gets added) when I'm trying dig through line history.
CuriouslyC•1 day ago
The trailing comma rule is to avoid errors when devs copy/paste a line or dump a new line at the end. This matters particularly for arrays in languages with implicit string concatenation, where the missing comma won't trigger a compile error.
9dev•1 day ago
You will find that pretty much every rule we have in any possible context will have some exceptions that are justified under some conditions.

Taking that as a reason to not have those rules in the first place seems like a logical fallacy that intelligent people should not make.

slig•1 day ago
Must be nice to write code with the hopes that only intelligent people will read it.
jbvlkt•1 day ago
Those tools actually save team energy. Without them any programmer has different opinion on formating, code quality, what is readable etc. You can discuss it endlesly or you can just use ruff.
maratc•1 day ago
We can replace the endless and useless discussion on how to format code with an endless and useless discussion on what linting tool to use.

Another option would be to leave both topics alone and go on with our lives, improving the product, fixing bugs, implementing new features, and generally giving customers a better product and shareholders more value, while respectfully agreeing to disagree on the issues of style.

jbvlkt•1 day ago
People tend to use tools set up in CICD and/or precommit. Without rules everyone uses their tool and is unwilling to compromise. Even if they are willing it is hard to setup tools to do exactly what you want. Default configuration is always the way.
Hendrikto•1 day ago
> We can replace the endless and useless discussion on how to format code with an endless and useless discussion on what linting tool to use.

That is why gofmt is so great. As the saying goes: gofmt’s style is nobody’s favorite, yet gofmt is everybody’s favorite.

toxik•about 23 hours ago
I have never discussed code formatting and drive-by changes more than in projects with auto formatters.
jghn•about 22 hours ago
Why though? I've yet to come across an auto formatter that formats things the way I personally like. But that's fine. I do whatever the hell I want until I'm ready to open a PR, then bang it through the auto formatter. And you know what? I can also go the other direction and run a home-brew auto formatter to reshape things the way I personally want on my local machine.
LaGrange•1 day ago
Gods forbid I talk to people I work with, learn their preferences, and figure out the way we can accommodate each other. Sounds like such a waste of energy. It’s so much better if we all acquiesce to the preferences of some people neither of works with!
brookst•1 day ago
How does that work when hundreds of people are working on a project, with a few new people joining every week?

It boggles me that anyone would argue against standardization, or believe that “just get hundreds of people to agree today and tomorrow and every future day” is a better solution.

jbvlkt•1 day ago
You can still talk to them about more important problems than placement of collons and closing bracket.
tipsytoad•about 22 hours ago
Stylistically ugly code that is globally consistent (ideally across the entire ecosystem) >> locally beautiful code that is inconsistent with the rest of the codebase / up to authors taste. No one likes black formatting, but it’s at least consistent. “Your car can be any color you like as long as it’s black”

With regards to your example, adding a comma to the final element should preserve multi-line. You just don’t know the formatting rules yet apparently

elteto•1 day ago
The actual rules are less important, only the consistency of applying them is.

I find that people who argue against automatic linting and formatting tend to be the same that would argue incessantly about style. So much wasted energy, I want none of that.

Also, in your example above, if you put the comment on the line _above_ instead of inline the formatter will most likely do the right thing.

maratc•1 day ago
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

elteto•1 day ago
TIL I am divine!

By the way, you have the exact energy of someone who would argue about code style: a prima donna who quotes Emerson when confronted with disagreement.

dirtbag__dad•about 23 hours ago
> The actual problems in the code I work with are not the spaces at the end of line or imports in non-alphabetic order, it's the 10-line list comprehensions that are so long that they're impossible for me to parse.

100%. Almost all of my time burned navigating code is not hung up on stylistic conventions but on nasty services with inconsistent abstractions and patterns.

BUT, conventions and consistency make code easier to read and write, period. If you’re debating over single or double quotes that’s almost a fireable offense IMO.

Additionally, when you have a culture that delegates to tools as much as possible, the focus sharpens in a healthy way.

tclancy•about 19 hours ago
> it's the 10-line list comprehensions

I feel for you both working with straw men day to day. I’ve worked mainly in Python for two decades and have neither seen such a thing nor considered, even to be a bastard, doing such a thing.

tclancy•1 day ago
You may do as you like in your projects. You might even find you can make a formatter enforce that rule which is apparently important to you.

But one thing I bring to every team is this: “I don’t want to look at a file and say that is Tom’s code or that is your code. What I want to see is [project name] code.”

maratc•1 day ago
You want to be a cog wheel, in a company of cog wheels. There's nothing wrong with that. But I want to be an artist, and preferably in a company of artists, having been in a company of cog wheels too many times. Not only it's more fun that way, but also tends to lead to better outcomes.
tclancy•about 20 hours ago
Wowsers. As what I think is a fellow traveler, I would encourage you to look back at all the places you created art and ask how many friends you made at each stop.
kstrauser•about 23 hours ago
That's an uncharitable take and I urge you to reconsider. I also take great joy and pride in the art of writing beautiful code. I have no desire to be a cog in a machine. However, my ADHD brain is delighted to not have to make a million little distracting decisions in place of the code planning I should be doing. Formatters let me concentrate on writing the best data structures and APIs and algorithms instead of how many spaces to put before comment markers or while kind of quote mark is more aesthetically pleasing in this particular file.

I, too, want to be an artist. For me, the flow of data through my work is the artistry, not the typography of the code.

NeutralCrane•1 day ago
This seems like a strange hill to die on. Linters don’t consume energy, that’s the entire point. They get everyone on the same standard so that no energy is wasted by anyone on having to discuss, debate, and implement these standards. And yes, there are instances where someone’s non-standard coding style is not a problem. But there are instances where it absolutely can be, and these tools help there.

I’m also not sure I understand the “ My place used pylint, flake8, black, ruff -- with hundreds of commits on every change”. These tools don’t add extra commits. You run them prior to your PR, get them aligned with the linting, and then commit the change you were already going to make. Thats 0 extra commits.

For someone ultimately arguing that there is too much effort spent on people’s coding styles, you are spending a lot of effort arguing about people’s coding styles. These tools are some of the most set it and forget it things around.

maratc•about 24 hours ago
> These tools don’t add extra commits.

When you replace tool x with tool y, you need to fix your code, because these tools do not agree on what your code should look like, and what was acceptable for tool x simply isn't for tool y.

One of these changes I mentioned brought a massive reformatting of all code base, as the new tool failed 'import' statements unless they were in alphabetical order.

OoooooooO•about 19 hours ago
If you change the formatter for your project then yes, you have a single commit where you reformat your project and then commit this.

A single commit after a tool change. I don't see the problem.

MawKKe•about 21 hours ago
Sounds like the issue is not the tools themselves, but that the project management / stewardship allows someone to replace tools willy-nilly leaving others to pay the cost of migration?

At $WORK we have "code guardians" whose responsibility is do to this kind of migrations strategically in the background. The intent is that most other developers should not need to do any (or very little) extra work beyond the task they are actively working on.

somat•about 24 hours ago
Oh man, list comprehensions, that's me. I get inspired, caught up in the flow, write some eldritch horror of a LC. 30 seconds later "What in the name of saint Lovecraft does this even do?" (sighs) Rewrite as a loop. I mean, I guess they are fine in small doses, very small doses, But boy do they read poorly compared to the rest of Python.

I also need something to save me from my regexps, the verbose flag helps a lot. but what would be really nice is some sort of python subset that could compile to the state machine. I would also like composable expressions, that is, composable at the graph level not the string composition we are forced to use. And a pony, I would also like a pony.

As you can tell I am not a fan of APL, not because of what it can do but because of the super compressed syntax it adopts. see also: perl

ckolkey•about 23 hours ago
Put a comma after "'z': 2" and it will work how you expect, fyi
gchamonlive•about 23 hours ago
The "bad" code is actually bad imho. The comment explains intent inside the object rather than on the spec, which makes it easy to miss and harder to discover later.

This seems like a case where the tooling is compensating for unclear conventions. Collaboration tools are useful, but it may be more effective to strengthen the code specifications and documentation practices first, so intent lives in a predictable place instead of being scattered through implementation details.

driverdan•1 day ago
The other commenters seem to be commenting on style consistency but ignoring your example. Your original format is far easier to read and understand plus the meaning of the comment is lost. IMO you're completely right about this example. Single line dict definitions shouldn't exist. Dicts are far easier to understand and manage when each key/value pair is on its own line, regardless of length.
slowking2•about 23 hours ago
IIRC, if you put a trailing comma on the last entry, the formatter will keep multiline dicts multiline.
maratc•about 24 hours ago
Thank you, but I'm afraid I disagree. Single line dict definitions are fine when that's my intent, multilines are also fine when that is, and I trust myself to know when to use one or the other. My problem is with arbitrary rules like "only x-line dict definitions are allowed," for any value of x.
aquariusDue•about 22 hours ago
Yeah, you've ruffled the feathers of people who've been conditioned to strive for uniformity through conformity. Alas you're tilting at windmills in this age of automatic code generation where people look at the general shape of the code and check its intent by running it.

Nobody even addressed the other issue you expressed about uncomprehensible code being fine for linters as long as it conforms to the style guide or low-hanging fruit of "don't use this deprecated method". Who knows, maybe soon enough someone will make a dev tool which runs per file, acknowledges your clever little piece of code and then yells at you that nowadays programming is a team sport called software engineering.

Personally it saddens me that I must agree with the other commenters even if I see where you're coming from. The mass produced, assembly-line with snazzy pipelines took over from the workshop in a wood shed style approach and code linters among other dev tools slot in much better in the former type of workflows than the latter. On one hand I want to be trusted to format my own code according to my intentions but it seems the majority has decided that this is a waste of time, needless bikeshedding and so on. I've begrudgingly gave in for the sake of collaboration which is more important to me in the grand scheme of things.

I guess the upside remains we're still free to do as we please on our own projects. Now to find similar thinking people huddling around Sublime Text shunning linters is not gonna be a cakewalk these days.

strken•about 24 hours ago
I'm surprised a formatter does that. Prettier in the JS world likes to jam destructured arguments onto one line, but it will leave them alone if there's a comment.
vorticalbox•1 day ago
this is why i like golang these sorts of things just don't matter, go fmt move on with life.
NeutralCrane•about 24 hours ago
I agree with you, but that is literally what ruff is meant to do, and what this person is arguing against.
atoav•about 24 hours ago
Yes sure, but the point of something like ruff is that you don't even think about formatting anymore. It is just done for you and it is done consistently.
cyberrock•1 day ago
It's funny to see this comment about Python, which was designed to be a style North Korea. Maybe in a decade we'll see a Go linter and have a good laugh at that.
woadwarrior01•1 day ago
Great to see ruff, ty and uv being actively developed, even after Astral was acquired by OpenAI.
gempir•1 day ago
I wish Go had something like Ruff! A lot of languages are getting amazing tool but Go has a very fragmented ecosystem with a lot of tools but none of them feel as high quality has the likes of Ruff, Oxc, Biome or even PHP's Mago
gopherino•1 day ago
It does and it is even better. It is called the Go Analysis Framework (https://pkg.go.dev/golang.org/x/tools/go/analysis).

It is fairly new so not well known but it is what powers go fix and go vet under the hood. And I believe the Go team is currently working on making it possible for module authors to easily describe their own custom analysis passes that would run automatically when running go fix.

It is extremely easy to define your own analysis.Analyzer struct that describes your own static analysis pass. You get access to all sorts of useful information such as the AST, types, even SSA info and you can even compose the information between analyzers. Then you can easily compile it into a binary and run it by passing that binary to go fix with a command line flag. The go toolchain itself handles all the complex caching logic so that your analyzers run fast.

Since it is made by the go team itself and part of the toolchain it should slowly become the unified standard you are looking for. So hopefully golangci-lint and others should eventually all unify under this framework.

You can easily give it a go by telling some AI agent to write some Go Analysis analyzers and telling them to drive them with go fix. My Go projects tend to accumulate a bunch of these to enforce all sorts of rules deterministically and automatically instead of some imprecise markdown file.

gempir•1 day ago
That sounds amazing! I do hope golangci-lint and the likes pick it up, I'm a big fan of the strict by default approach that Ruff and other linters have taken.

Gofmt is great but it's still not very strict, the amount of times my colleagues have argued about formatting in Go is still too great, stuff like consts, types, funcs, methods order, struct initialziation newlines and other details that do matter, but they should be decided one and then applied everywhere like that.

silverwind•1 day ago
On problem of such go linters is they can only lint what the compiler sees so if you have multiple `build` tags, you need to run multiple lint passes. No other language's linter operates like they, they all operate on file level.
AbuAssar•1 day ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49057398

Let's spread the word

alentred•1 day ago
Oh wow, not so long ago the sentiment was exactly opposite. Python community was struggling with tools and everyone wished to have `gofmt` for Python.

Granted, this is a linter, not a formatter, but my larger point is I am glad that Python ecosystem evolved like it did recently.

gempir•1 day ago
Yeah, that's how much Astral changed python. UV and Ruff are amazing tools.

Go can get there, but like I said, I think everyone is building some partial tools that solve some problems, but there is not that one player building that one great tool.

jdrek1•1 day ago
Ruff is actually a formatter too
Hamuko•1 day ago
It's not really even that recent of a change. Black's been stable for the past 4+ years.
bargainbin•1 day ago
I’m not entirely sure what you mean by a fragmented ecosystem? Go has first-party formatting and linting and the language is deliberately restricted to ensure it is written in a certain way, even when written by complete novices.

Compare that to Python or TypeScript which are Wild West languages without opinionated first-party tooling, and it’s clear why Ruff/Biome feel great.

You just wouldn’t get that same high with Go.

gempir•1 day ago
Go has a good start for that, but It's not enough for me.

Gofmt is a great idea but it isn't strict enough for my taste. Go does not have any first party static analyzers, closest is Staticcheck which is even sponsored by Google themselves

arccy•1 day ago
go vet, plus all the ones in gopls?
aki237•1 day ago
What? I feel go has one of the best language tooling out there without requiring a bully ide to do stuff. golangci-lint is quite comprehensive. What do you miss otherwise?

(Honestly go's distributing itself has covered a lot of it)

gempir•1 day ago
golangci-lint is good, but you have to glue together a bunch of linters, and it adds up. You can easily get runtimes of several minutes, there are caches etc but the main problem is that golangci-lint doesn't own the lints, so it will never be as fast as something like Ruff.
Thaxll•1 day ago
Golang-ci exists for a while and everyone is using it.

Not sure what you're talking about.

gempir•1 day ago
I've been using golangci-lint for years, it's okay but it's slow even with a cache, as soon as you have good amount of lints enabled your ci can suddendly take minutes.

That's not the fault of golangci-lint, it's just the concept of bringing together a bunch of different linters and keeping it fast is impossible. And the configuration is a bit wild too, because every linter obviously has their own decisions on how it wants to be configured.

Ruff can lint in seconds or even sub second.

silverwind•1 day ago
It's like 100 times slower than ruff. They had to massive caching techniques to get it to a remotely acceptable speed.
hyeongjun•1 day ago
Good news. enabling 413 rules by default means most projects get useful linting without touching the config at all!
embedding-shape•1 day ago
Maybe it's just me, but getting overrun with "413 x potential warnings" hardly sounds useful :) Great for greenfield, less so for existing projects. Although nowadays, fire up your agent with "/goal work through and address all lint warnings by fixing the code according to XYZ" and leave it alone for a couple of hours and I guess it's no longer an issue...

Don't get me wrong, the new level of details coming from Ruff is much appreciated and a good thing :)

biorach•1 day ago
> uv run ruff check --fix

Generally gets you 90% there.

apelapan•1 day ago
On the 0.16.0 release it was more like 10% autofixable on the codebases I maintain. One of them had 100+ unfixable errors across less than 10k lines of code and tests in total. Previous ruff version labeled it perfectly clean on format and check with default settings.

Good thing we have LLM:s that can do the tedious work of checking each case and applying local annotations or updating the config globally! If I was stuck doing this manually, I would have just gotten rid of ruff and went back to black+pylint.

vasachi•1 day ago
In reality it got me 30% there.
jon-wood•about 23 hours ago
I really wish Ruff would introduce something similar to Nix’s stateVersion, which is used to determine the set of defaults that will be applied. Updating Ruff at a scale beyond a single repo is a bit of a crapshoot currently, with every version introducing a bunch of new default rules which you then have to deal with immediately (either by turning them off or fixing them).

I’m aware we could have an allowlist in place which specifies all rules that are turned on but I’d much rather have a simpler config file, and be able to bump the state version at a good time for everyone to spend a few hours fixing new violations.

mirashii•about 23 hours ago
I think the consensus is that this would be the wrong end to tackle the problem from. Your project should include ruff at the version it wants to use in its pyproject.toml. Bump the version when you're ready to spend the time on one project, but no need to coordinate across multiple projects. If you really want to do it, you can, but if there's one hold-out, you're not stuck behind forever because one project can't move yet.
kstenerud•1 day ago
This is great news! With the advent of agentic coding, strong linting is more important than ever. What I'd really like to see is forbidigo for more languages.
alentred•1 day ago
100% agree, I am upgrading my projects now. And yet, I have mixed feelings about this. I like to think that when I (was) writing code myself, I applied a great deal of intuition to decide when to skip or ignore some rule. On the hand, I also saw projects were developers where using pylint with most rules enabled and I have to say the code was not better - on the contrary it had plenty of hacks to make pylint happy at the cost of illegible code.

Not unlike that experience, I also saw coding agents spend lots of tokens trying to fix a benign issue, as well as doing the opposite - like disabling the tests !!! when they don't pass. :facepalm:

I grew to trust AI results in terms of overall correctness, but I still have hard time trusting their *judgement* on the *code quality*.

hackerbrother•1 day ago
Looks like it's recommended to use zero-config now, which is great! My new .ruff.toml is just:

  line-length = 300
luciana1u•1 day ago
413 rules and somehow every codebase I join still has the same three arguments about import sorting
aomix•1 day ago
If you listen closely you can hear the thousands of CI jobs that just pull latest UV failing all at once.
vanyaland•1 day ago
ran 0.16 on a file with no config, it flags unsorted imports and `except Exception` by default now
anticodon•about 24 hours ago
You know how many bugs I've met working on large Python codebases over 20 years, caused by unsorted imports or `except Exception`? Yeah, you've guessed it: exactly 0 bugs.

It's really annoying how many people think that if you enforce stupidly strict rules about formatting, more strict that those of Fortran in 70s, you'll automatically get good code.

I've seen companies that enable 100% of ruff rules, use several other linters, and enforce other rules (like every variable name should be at least 20 characters long to fully describe its purpose). And they have awful buggy unmaintainable code. But it is nicely formatted (although reading code where half of the screen estate is consumed by the variable name is a bit difficult) and has no "dreadful" `except Exception`. Or every mutable class attribute variable is annotated with `typing.ClassVar` (RUF012 - the most idiotic rule I've ever seen). Nevermind that it doesn't really stop anyone from changing value of that attribute. You must annotate it with `ClassVar`!

It's an idiotic cargo-cult.

BigTTYGothGF•about 22 hours ago
I think it should depend on if it's `except Exception` (don't use) or `except Exception as e` (probably fine, as long as you log `e` or do something else with it).
IshKebab•about 19 hours ago
I don't think people expect import sorting to fix bugs. It's just good (and free!) practice.

Anyway I have definitely had linters like Ruff catch bugs. Probably the most common is the mutable default argument gotcha.

anticodon•about 9 hours ago
I'm not saying that it's not catching bugs. Sometimes it does. But most of the rules are nonsense and the number of rules that makes no sense is growing.

Also, mutable default argument is not a bug. It is a bug only if mutable default argument is mutated inside the body of a function/method. Which is almost never the case.

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westurner•about 19 hours ago
TIL RustPython uses Ruff's AST which is fast.

LibCST can modify the AST/CST to do python codemod, now in Rust too;

rustpython-ruff_python_parser: https://crates.io/crates/rustpython-ruff_python_parser .. https://github.com/astral-sh/ruff

LibCST: https://github.com/Instagram/LibCST

bbor•1 day ago

  Ruff v0.16 has a small number of breaking changes
Why. Why must my poor semver be hurt so!

I sorta kinda get why `ty` is pre v1.0.0 -- it's a typechecker that doesn't check a huge number of types. But what are we waiting for with `ruff`? Surely it's eaten whatever the old options were (black? maybe a few takes on py+lint?) by now many times over, and is even more dominant than `uv`.

I run this program hundreds of times a day so I'm generally excited for new features, but I guess the OAI acquisition has made me ornery when it comes to these folks. Apologies to kindly nerds who made this release happen, and congrats <3

microtonal•1 day ago
Why must my poor semver be hurt so!

It is fully according to their versioning policy:

https://docs.astral.sh/ruff/versioning/

But also compliant with semver:

Major version zero (0.y.z) is for initial development. Anything MAY change at any time. The public API SHOULD NOT be considered stable.

https://semver.org/

(Maybe I misinterpreted your remark, but semver does not get hurt.)

colinmarc•1 day ago
It's conventional for semver to allow breaking changes for 0.x minor releases (but not for patch releases).
jakobnissen•1 day ago
Yes but the question is why Ruff has not released v1 yet. They’re clearly used in production and the entire purpose of v0.x is to signal a project is early in development and is expected to have coarse edges.
ameliaquining•1 day ago
The versioning doc linked elsewhere in the thread explains: There isn't yet a stable API and they want to wait on that before releasing v1.
Leynos•1 day ago
Zerover for life
latent-9•1 day ago
this is writing 3000 lines in this era you must be a normal human being
assimpleaspossi•1 day ago
I find it somehow interesting that a tool for Python is written in Rust.
fn-mote•1 day ago
Interesting but not surprising in an application where speed matters.
IshKebab•1 day ago
It's the same for JavaScript. Rust is the better language (especially for large projects like these), but sometimes you don't have a choice but to use Python or JS/TS.
Hamuko•1 day ago
Wait until you hear what CPython is written in.
mikeydiamonds•1 day ago
Default on lint is good for agent fleets. fwiw, I watched one agent "fix" an unfamiliar rule by deleting the test; perfect compliance, tiny misunderstanding.
blks•1 day ago
Every new single piece of software calls itself “extremely fast”, “blazingly fast”, it gets tiring.
BigTTYGothGF•about 22 hours ago
Compare it to some of the other options in that space and you'll see why that was a selling point.
frumiousirc•1 day ago
ruff is not new. It's also truly really fast. On an as-yet un-ruff'ed 32k SLOC python package it returns in 158ms finding 2k errors. Having it fix errors is also very fast.

What's really tiring is reading such facile "critiques", especially when they are not even applicable.