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Is ESLint Worth Your time?

Kaleb M on March 05, 2019

Hello everyone! I'm Kaleb and this is my first Dev.to post. I'm thrilled to finally post as part of the community, and look forward to connecting ...
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Tirtha Guha

For small projects you can avoid linting. But for large ecosystems, like 50+ devs working with 1.5 million lines of code, we need some consistency to ease development, debugging and review. I'm absolutely for linting.

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Kaleb M

I'd love to hear more on your reasoning for this?

I find that smaller teams have to handle larger responsibilities, meaning more of the code base (percentage wise), even though less of them are actually writing it.

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Richard Pap

I don't think it would be about just the size on the team. When you lead a team of junior devs for example, it's also a really useful thing to teach them.

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Tirtha Guha

Consistency is the keyword here. Random coding styles makes difficult to support code. Every class or file would start to have different styles, and that would make debugging a nightmare. Instead, enforce a consistent coding style and make everyone's life easy.

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Kaleb M

Yes I would agree - wouldn't a linter help with that consistent style for small and large teams?

I was trying to understand the difference between the two from your perspective, as I've only worked on smaller web applications compared to enterprise level imho.

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Kaleb M

Agreed! Especially if you use a config like Airbnb's which is strict :D

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Michael "lampe" Lazarski

EVERY project I work on has eslint enabled. There is no reason not to add it!

It's also super easy to add.

Eslint has an init command!

Path_to_eslint/eslint.js --init and then you can choose! What's so hard about it? Nothing! So use it 😀✌️

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Kaleb M

Nice! I really like the ease of it and it comes with a default config for you :)

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Michael "lampe" Lazarski

Yes and that is the beauty of it!

😀✌️

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Ben Halpern

Yes!

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Kaleb M

Thank you for reading Nick!

I totally agree - prettier + eslint => so much more time spent on the right things!

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Strahinja Laktovic

Definitely yes. I didn't like it at first, but the consistency and cleanliness of code it enforces is really satisfying and makes you really appreciate it once code base grows. Love it now.

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Kaleb M

Agreed! Makes it so much easier to maintain standards for a team or big project :)

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Cesar Mostacero

Definitely, yes!
Code should not be enough, we should create quality code, and linters are one of the parts to achieve it.

Good post, Kaleb!

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Kaleb M

Thanks Cesar! I definitely agree!

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Kaleb M

lol! I've heard the TS tools make dev really wonderful with VSCode