Prettier and Opinionated Code Formatting with James Long

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Mar 19, 2026

James Long, design and product engineer who created Prettier and worked at Mozilla and Stripe. He talks about why opinionated, deterministic formatting matters. He explains how formatters differ from linters and why style debates get emotional. He discusses open source maintenance, performance tradeoffs, and why rewrites in Rust appeal for huge codebases.

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ANECDOTE

Co-Creation And A Viral Tweet Sparked Prettier

Christopher Chadeau quickly became a co-creator and major contributor after the first Prettier implementation, accelerating adoption.
James Long credits a viral tweet and timing around complex JS patterns for Prettier's rapid growth in 2018.

INSIGHT

JavaScript Requires Contextual Breaking Rules

Prettier needed richer heuristics than Go's formatter because JavaScript has nested inline functions and context-dependent breaking.
Simpler always-break strategies failed visually on real JS patterns, so Prettier implemented contextual breaking tied to print width.

INSIGHT

Popular Tools Often Run On Limited Sponsor Funding

Prettier operates as community-maintained open source without a business, so funding is limited and most contributors work part-time.
James Long notes maintainers deserve more compensation and that donations shape activity levels over time.

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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 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.

Josh Goldberg is an independent full time open source developer in the TypeScript ecosystem. He works on projects that help developers write better TypeScript more easily, most notably on typescript-eslint: the tooling that enables ESLint and Prettier to run on TypeScript code. Josh regularly contributes to open source projects in the ecosystem such as ESLint and TypeScript. Josh is a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies and the author of the acclaimed Learning TypeScript (O’Reilly), a cherished resource for any developer seeking to learn TypeScript without any prior experience outside of JavaScript. Josh regularly presents talks and workshops at bootcamps, conferences, and meetups to share knowledge on TypeScript, static analysis, open source, and general frontend and web development.

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