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Linting: The Seat Belts of Software
My personal experience with linting, and why I think it’s worth it
Seatbelts
Cars these days are pretty adamant about the fact that you should wear a seatbelt. Our family car, a 2008 Prius (they just don’t die, do they?) will beep incessantly if the driver or the passenger aren’t wearing their seatbelts. It’s annoying enough that even if you hate seatbelts, you’ll click it because you don’t want to get beeped at.
But they obviously are beeping for a reason. You can be fined for not wearing them, and 50% of car accident fatalities were for people not wearing seatbelts.
They can be annoying, uncomfortable, and restraining. But all for a good reason.
Although most drivers and passengers won’t need them most of the time, the price for not wearing them in critical moments can be the highest price of them all. 💀
A minor inconvenience to forego a major bit of suffering.
What does that have to do with linting, well…
Linting
If you’ve never heard the term, it refers to that lint trap you have on a drier that stops lint from getting to places that might cause a fire.
It is all over the software space, from warnings and errors at compile time (i.e. before…
