Why I don't like the black code formatter

First off I understand the need for a tool to avoid teammates bickering with each other, and if I joined a team using black I would follow their rules.

However:

1. ’ is cleaner than “. To me, ‘ has less visual noise than “. It’s a single stroke rather than two. Additionally, on US keyboards ‘ does not require pressing shift, “ does.

2. Black loves newlines, this leads to too much whitespace and makes skimming code harder

Take a look at this image.

This could take half the space, and then I could view twice as many arguments in one go.

Black favoring to break functions with arguments up like this

function(
    argument
)

generally leads to one seeing much less code on one’s screen than originally. This worsens readability. I can see the argument for doing this for a function with ten arguments, but one? Nah.

I might think of more issues this is it for now.

2024 Update: Andrej Karpathy agrees!