ESLint, Your Code's Best Friend
06 Feb 2019After about a week of using ESLint, a software that analyzes your code and returns any problematic patterns in it, here’s what I have to say about it.
Less error indication, more problems.
To start off, let me express how grateful I am for ESLint. This software just makes everything easier for you. Imagine having to write a complicated program under a given amount of time. Personally, I don’t care too much about code style and code standards, my first priority is to make the code WORK. But at some point I have come to the realization that in reality, other people will look at your code and see not only if it works, but also as to how it works. No programmer wants to see some spaghetti code that is difficult to interpret and try to make sense out of it themselves, it’s just unnecessary stress. So that’s why there is a standard in which people follow in order to allow that clean communication and interpretation of programming between peers.
This coding standard does play a factor in time consumption. You will have to look over your code, put your shoes in another programmer’s and ask yourself “Will I be able to understand this if it wasn’t me who coded this?”, and that definitely takes time.
This is when ESLint steps in.
ESLint will significantly cut out that factor of time consumption when you need to have your code meet that coding standard. Why would you go through the trouble and time of manually remembering what the coding standard is when you can have something as convenient as this in the palm of your hands?
My experience of using it.
Initially installing ESLint didn’t take much time and I got it set up in my IntelliJ almost instantly. When I started to use it you would not believe how many errors I have found in my code. Although at first I was intimidated, ultimately that made me reflect on myself and got me into the habit of writing good code. This software keeps my coding in shape and somewhat comforts me in a way that my code will be following a coding standard that majority, if not all, programmers will understand.
Final thoughts
All in all I feel that ESLint is kind of like that “best friend” you need (that you may not like all the time) that calls you out on when you’re writing crappy, unreadable code. Although it may be frustrating, at the end of the day, it is what you NEED.
Thanks for reading!