Propose to use clang-format to enforce hotspot codestyle

[Andrew Haley]

On 3/13/20 3:27 AM, John Rose wrote:
> So when someone comes along and says, “You forgot the
> style rule book but luckily I have one for you”, you are
> dealing with a prescriptivist.  If you say, “wait, that doesn’t
> describe what we are doing”, perhaps from a descriptivist
> viewpoint, you will be talking at cross purposes for a while.
> The prescriptivist will say, “that’s OK, I’ll change my rules
> for your practice”, but still assume that a central Academy
> (of some sort) is the obvious right answer.

I have been programming for a long while and I'm interested in
linguistics, but I have never seen the connection between programming
style enforcement and prescriptivist linguistics explained like this
before. Thank you! That was a very useful addition to my mental
furniture.

I'm reminded of David Crystal's (?) fantasy about linguists studying
whale song in which one, on finding a whale who sings differently from
the others, says with excitement "that whale made a mistake!"  :-)

-- 
Andrew Haley  (he/him)
Java Platform Lead Engineer
Red Hat UK Ltd. <https://www.redhat.com>
https://keybase.io/andrewhaley
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