This is world autoformatters have wrought. The central dogma of the autoformatter is that "formatting" is based on dumb syntactic rules with no inflow of imprecise human judgements.
Most autoformatters do not reformat string constants as GP has said, and even if they did, this is something that can be much more accurately and correctly specified with an AF than with a human.
Autoformatting collectively saves probably close to millions of work hours per year in our industry, and that’s at the current adoption. Do you think it’s productive to manually space things out, clean up missing trailing commas and what not? Machines do it better.
> Even if you have, say, 5 sequential related structs, that are all virtually identical, all written on one line so that the similarities and differences are obvious at a mere glance... Then someone comes through and touches my file, and while they're at it, "fix" the line that went 2 characters past the 80 mark by reformatting the 4th struct to span several lines.
Autoformatters absolutely do this. They do not understand considerations like symmetry.
I am doubtful as to the costs of "somewhere in the codebase there is a missing trailing comma".
The wins of autoformatting are 1) never having to have a dispute over formatting or have formatting depend on who last touched code, 2) never manually formatting code or depending on someone's editor configuration, 3) having CI verify formatting, and 4) not having someone (intentionally or unintentionally) make unrelated formatting changes in a commit.
Also, autoformatters can be remarkably good. For instance, rustfmt will do things like:
x.func(Some(MyStruct {
field: big + long + expr,
field2,
}));
rather than mindlessly introducing three levels of indentation.
