Setup a standard way to write Lost with Linting/Documentation

[peterramsing]

Open for discussion but I think this would be a great direction to help ensure the maintainability of the codebase.

StandardJS

[corysimmons]

Let's do it. :^)

/discussion

[peterramsing]

Ps: thanks for the recommendation @Adrianca

[wyze]

In case you are a fan of semicolons, there is Semistandard.

Lost is currently using semicolons, so I thought I would just toss this out there.

[corysimmons]

Wtf Standardjs doesn't support semi-colons? Why add that in by default? Ugh, I'll research this a bit but I'm so used to semi-colons and pretty sure everyone else in the world is. This might be one of those better-but-unnecessary changes that just throws everyone off a bit. :\

[corysimmons]

After about 20 mins of research, twbs/bootstrap#3057 (comment) kinda sums up my feelings on this.

This semi-colonless business got me thinking about how much I like Python and Stylus though...

Anyone else think CoffeeScript is a good idea (I'd love to learn it) or would we be closing the door on a lot of potential contributors? Is CoffeeScript even a thing anymore? It seems like there are a million articles about how vanilla JS is better.

[wyze]

CoffeeScript would be closing the door on potential contributors. I believe it is on it's way out. It was all the rage a few years ago but now ES2015 (ES6) is the new rage and has gained a bunch of steam over the past year due to Babel.

[peterramsing]

I'm not stuck on any tool in particular. I personally am a fan of the ; but am more of a fan of standards. I don't think that CoffeeScript is the right direction and I'm not sure if ES2015 is where Lost should go just yet.

I think that @Adrianca makes a good point about having a standard. I've noticed that different parts of Lost are written in different ways and I'd love to make Lost easier to contribute to by having a standard way that it is written. I was intending on adding .eslint to help with this in the future anyway–maybe that's where this starts along with some more documentation on how Lost is/should be written.

I'll adjust this issue to address the conversation about standardizing Lost for future development.

[adrian2x]

I also agree that CoffeeScript is on its way out. It's not standard, not well adopted, not everyone knows it... ES6 is the new standard, and moreover, JS will have a new update every year! So in terms of support, and adopting new features, ES6 seems like the way to go! Since lost runs on top of node, the latest version could use whatever ES6 features have been implemented by default on latest LTS version of node. Previous versions could just use ES5 as usual.

Semistandard looks great too. I didn't know about this one but I'm leaning more towards preserving semicolons to allow for more people to be able to contribute to the project, as I believe far more people are used to semicolons.

[corysimmons]

Okay I'll forget CoffeeScript (my indentation! 😭) and start familiarizing myself with ES6.

@Adrianca rule about matching Lost's ES6 with LTS Node's ES6 features seems pretty sound.

I vote for Semistandard and Node-friendly ES6.