Use prettier for code style guide

[ChadBailey]

I think creating a full fledged style guide, or even expecting contributors to adhere to a common style guide is probably too much for a project of this size. That said, I do think the code base could benefit greatly from improved styling. Today there are a lot of minor formatting errors like mismatched indentation levels, etc. These have no impact on the functionality of the code, but it certainly makes contributing more difficult.

For these reasons I think some kind of easy to follow style guide should be chosen for the project. I think the best option may be using something like the prettier formatter. This would simplify styling while improving consistency and legibility.

What do you all think?

I have created a PR #579 to demonstrate how this would look

[igrigorik]

I like it. Enforcing a style guide would help eliminate a bunch of unnecessary back-n-forth on nitpick style comments, and consistency is great.

I would suggest we explore two options here:

1. Setup a PR validation step that runs a check and blocks any PR if it's not formatted correctly
2. Or, setup a bot to autoformat on commit

Between the two, I think my preference is (1) as it results in less surprises to folks committing code, even though it requires a bit more work from them.

[ChadBailey]

I agree, great thoughts. I wonder if there's a way to have it block the PR but give the option of having a bot autoformat it for them if they don't want to bother figuring it out for themselves.

I'll take a closer look at the options when I find the time.

[igrigorik]

Indeed, that would be ideal, but I wouldn't consider that a blocker. We could check-in a formatter config and provide some instructions on how to install and run it.

Thanks for digging into this!

[ChadBailey]

I've submitted a PR... unfortunately, it does not accomplish blocking an ill-formatted PR though. I couldn't figure out how to do that (I'd love to learn if you have some suggestions of where I can look). I have come up with what I'm hoping is an acceptable compromise of creating a pre-commit hook