alex VS Standard

Catch insensitive, inconsiderate writing with tools like alex

This story has been a motivating principle behind my life for a long time, and therefore, whenever I've worked on docs, I've thought about how I could ensure that exclusionary words, even unintentionally, did not make their way into the final copy. During my time at Nexmo, a communications API company, I introduced Alex, an NPM package that helps you identify potentially exclusionary language in your writing, into the CI/CD pipeline for the documentation.

As a philosophy student: Zotero for reference management, the Better BibTeX plugin to auto-generate a .bib file, and two language servers for diagnostics: LTeX for grammar- and spellchecking, and alex for style and sensitivity checking.

When using it as a lib you can pass a markdown string (https://github.com/get-alex/alex#markdownvalue-config) or raw text string (https://github.com/get-alex/alex#textvalue-config). This will return an object that should contain everything you need to perform a naive replacement.

alex is a lovely command-line tool that takes in text or markdown files and, using retext-equality and retext-profanities, highlights suggestions for improvement. alex checks for gendered work titles, gendered proverbs, ableist language, condescending or intolerant language, profanities, and much more.

Heck, he could even go so far and start using GitHub's automation system (Actions) to run some check on his writing. (Maybe something like alexjs)

I've been a part of several code clean-ups where giant code bases needed to be changed to considerate language. I've never once encountered a bad actor when the actual work got underway. Part of being a programmer is to question the reasoning behind large changes but any programmer worth their salt understands the big picture if you can clearly explain it. I wouldn't read too much into the actions of a few people in any programming subreddit who are opposed to pronouns. Those people will always exist. I'm certain that the vast majority of programmers in those subs are either strongly in favour of gendered pronouns or are apathetic toward it. To drive home the point, the fight for considerate language has been driven by developers themselves. All these wonderful tools such as alex.js or even org level changes inside big companies are part of it.

alex

I picked up standard[1] a while back for this reason, I don't want to have to think about it. It works fine, I have no complaints (took me a while to get used to not using semi-colons but now I prefer it) Same reason I use `cargo fmt` as well.

[1] https://standardjs.com/

# question 1: ? How would you like to use ESLint? … To check syntax only To check syntax and find problems ❯ To check syntax, find problems, and enforce code style # question 2: ? What type of modules does your project use? … ❯ JavaScript modules (import/export) CommonJS (require/exports) None of these # question 3: ? Which framework does your project use? … ❯ React Vue.js None of these # question 4 (select "No", because we won't add TypeScript support for this project): ? Does your project use TypeScript? › No / Yes # question 5: ? Where does your code run? … Browser ✔ Node # question 6: ? How would you like to define a style for your project? … ❯ Use a popular style guide Answer questions about your style Inspect your JavaScript file(s) # question 7 (we'll rely on Airbnb's JavaScript style guide here): ? Which style guide do you want to follow? … ❯ Airbnb: https://github.com/airbnb/javascript Standard: https://github.com/standard/standard Google: https://github.com/google/eslint-config-google # question 8: ? What format do you want your config file to be in? … JavaScript YAML ❯ JSON # the final prompt here is where eslint will ask you if you want to install all the necessary dependencies. Select "Yes" and hit enter: Checking peerDependencies of eslint-config-airbnb@latest The config that you have selected requires the following dependencies: eslint-plugin-react@^7.21.5 eslint-config-airbnb@latest eslint@^5.16.0 || ^6.8.0 || ^7.2.0 eslint-plugin-import@^2.22.1 eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y@^6.4.1 eslint-plugin-react-hooks@^4 || ^3 || ^2.3.0 || ^1.7.0 ? Would you like to install them now with npm? › No / Yes

A Thin JavaScript Document Storage with Middleware Stack

https://github.com/standard/standard/issues/384

For example, if you use https://standardjs.com/ - it will error on your second code snippet and if you ask it for an autofix - it will transfer the minus sign to the first line.

In comparison, JavaScript doesn't have a strict coding standard, although it does have widely accepted code style guides like the Airbnb JavaScript Style Guide and the JavaScript Standard Style. These guides provide recommendations for code formatting and naming conventions, but they are not as strictly enforced as the Java coding standard.