Developer tooling shapes how software gets written day-to-day, but the best tools often disappear into the background once they succeed.

Formatting, linting, and build systems can either create friction and endless debate or quietly remove entire classes of problems from a team's workflow.

Over the past decade, the JavaScript ecosystem has wrestled with both extremes, as it scaled rapidly and accumulated complexity.

Prettier emerged as a response to the surprisingly human problem of engineers spending too much time debating code style instead of building software.

It offers a deterministic opinionated formatter that helped normalize automation as part of building software. It offers a deterministic, opinionated formatter that helped normalize

automation as part of everyday development. James Long is a design and product engineer who has

worked at Mozilla and Stripe, and he's the creator of Prettier. He joins the show with Josh Goldberg

to talk about the origins of prettier, why formatting debates are

so emotionally charged, the technical challenges of building formatters, the realities of maintaining

popular open source tools, and how the JavaScript tooling ecosystem continues to evolve.

This episode is hosted by Josh Goldberg, an independent full-time open-source developer.

Josh works on projects in the TypeScript ecosystem, most notably TypeScript ESLint, a powerful

static analysis tool set for JavaScript and TypeScript. He is also the author of the O'Reilly

Learning TypeScript book, a Microsoft MVP for developer

technologies, and a co-founder of SquiggleConf, a conference for excellent web developer tooling.

Find Josh on Blue Sky, Fostodon, and dot com as Joshua K. Goldberg.

With me today is James Long, a design and product engineer who has worked at companies such as Mozilla and Stripe, created prettier and open-sourced the actual finance app. James, welcome to Software Engineering Daily. Thank you, Josh. Very happy to be here. So excited to talk to you. As a user of Prettier and advocate for this is a dream come true. But before we dive into Prettier and formatting and all these fun JavaScript and TypeScript dev tools, can you tell us who are you and how did you get into

coding? Sure. So I'm James. I've been coding really since I've been in the industry for over two

decades. But, you know, I was kind of the typical cliche like 90s kid that was hacking on

computers. Just kind of always we happen to have, I think it was an Apple 2 in our house when I was

like in middle school. And I just kind of instantly gravitated towards that, just kind of like a lot of nerdy kids did in that age. And I remember programming in was it QBASic? There was the one that was just like you had like the 10, 20, 30, 40 with the line numbers for some reason. It wasn't one, two, three, four, I'm pretty sure.

And I think the thing that really draw me to it also is that I could draw things to the screen. So I remember like drawing lines. And it was just like that green kind of terminal look was the only color that it had. But you could like draw lines and draw shapes. And it was really cool is you could actually play notes too. Like it had it had a command like play A flat. so you could draw little lines and have these things animated and like it would play music.

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