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Prettier and Opinionated Code Formatting with James Long

March 19, 2026·51 min·2 clips

A decade-old tool used by millions raised only $243K—a stark reminder of open source's funding crisis

James Long, the creator of Prettier, joins to discuss the journey of building one of JavaScript's most influential developer tools. Prettier launched with mixed reactions - while some developers immediately adopted it and got 'Prettier pilled,' others pushed back against its opinionated formatting decisions. The early days involved countless GitHub issues debating formatting choices, with discussions about ternary operators taking years to resolve. Long emphasizes that eventually maintainers had to make decisions and move on rather than debate endlessly. The financial reality of Prettier is stark - despite being used by millions of developers, the project has raised only $243,000 across nine years on OpenCollective, highlighting the sustainability challenges facing open source tooling. Long stepped back from active maintenance after the first year to pursue contracting work and product development, with Christopher Chadeau taking on much of the ongoing work. The project operates without a formal business structure, relying on donations and part-time contributors. Long distinguishes between the creative exploration phase of open source projects and the maintenance phase, noting that different people find energy in different aspects of project development. When asked what he would work on with infinite time and money, Long surprisingly states that Prettier feels completed to him as a daily user, though he acknowledges performance needs for large codebases that tools like Ox Format address through Rust rewrites. He explains that Rust rewrites often gain speed not just from the language but from algorithmic improvements and better toolchain integration. Long discusses the evolution of JavaScript tooling, arguing that complaints about complexity are outdated given improvements from tools like Vite and Bun. He expresses skepticism about React Server Components while showing interest in SolidJS and Remix 3 for future web development. The technical discussion covers how Prettier works as a JavaScript-to-JavaScript compiler, parsing code into ASTs, converting to an intermediate representation with formatting information, then generating formatted output. Long emphasizes that comments present the biggest technical challenge in formatters because they're not semantically meaningful in ASTs but must be preserved and repositioned correctly. He warns against running Prettier through ESLint due to significant performance overhead from multiple parsing passes. The conversation concludes with Long's recent exploration of music theory, particularly his fascination with harmonics, the circle of fifths, and how dissonance creates musical tension and resolution. He's returned to learning piano, finding it more intuitive than guitar for understanding musical relationships.

As heard by us

A clear look at what opinionated formatting is meant to solve, and when a Rust rewrite earns its keep.

James Long treats Prettier less like a feature list and more like a tradeoff: less friction, faster calls, and fewer small decisions every day.

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Why you'd press play

If formatter debates land in your code review queue, this one has substance.

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