The Ultimate Guide to Linting
An essential guide to linting for making your code more readable and life easier
Background
Code quality has been a big topic of discussion in the last decade. More people are talking about it now as more people have to read more code on a daily basis. Reading other people’s code is hard. We all know that! A lot of tools, IDEs have made our lives easier by providing a standard framework to work within. These tools enforce some level of sanity but a lot still needs to be done by the developer.
Good, readable code saves more time than we think. The first step, I think, to writing good, readable code is to be stylistically consistent — be it indentation, the spaces between two functions, the way you declare variables, even the way you import libraries. All this has to be taken care of while you’re writing your code for the first time. After that, there are tools to help you out.
A linter is one such tool that helps identify potential issues with the code based just on style guides, naming standards, typos, and bugs too. Linter is a part of the larger picture of code quality. Most languages, based on their stylistic grammar and syntactical structure, have found standard ways of writing code in them. Yes, there are debates over tabs and spaces but most of the…
