ESLint is more than just Lint
08 Feb 2021My Previous Experiences with Other Coding Standards
Have you ever reached a point where your face is devoid of any emotions trying to solve a problem? In my case, this painful experience most commonly appears when I am fixing simple coding errors. While my overall experiences with other coding standards are not that horrific, there are several instances that come to mind. The memories of staring hopelessly into my monitor, trying to figure out what in the world would resolve the error remains very fresh in my mind. I would get a coding standard error, read the documentation of the error, and then think I knew an exact solution. I would try it and see that the error still remained and then I would go back to the drawing board and the cycle repeats. Starting with vigor, my voice starts to groan, then after each cycle, my groans get louder and longer.
How did ESLint Fare Against its Predecessors?
As a result, before I experienced ESLint, my exact thought in the most exasperated tone was “Looks like the cycle will begin again”. However, after trying ESLint with IntelliJ, I have been thoroughly surprised and impressed. On top of ESLint’s impressive ability to find formatting errors in long and detailed lines of code, the simplicity of finding the error’s corresponding documentation was mind-blowing. Rather than copying and pasting random words, simply typing in a little and short phrase into Google is enough to find exactly what you did wrong.
In addition, ESLint’s feature to provide guidance about the best practices, also providing some of the different fixes, and sometimes automatically fixing some errors was just as mind-blowing, if not more. For instance, I wrote a piece of code that was not necessarily wrong, but not the best practice. Without noticing it, ESLint automatically fixed it. When I found out there were changes, I was thoroughly confused, but when I realized what had happened, I was in complete awe.
While there were still some instances of repeating errors, ESLint’s positive aspects made the process of making code conforming to the coding standards very painless.