In a nutshell, a linter is a tool that analyzes source code and flags errors and bugs in the code and styles. The term originated in 1978 from a Unix utility called lint that evaluated source code written in C, and was developed by computer scientist Stephen C. Johnson at Bell Labs while debugging the Yacc grammar he was writing. Today, the tools we focus on in this book are Prettier, ESLint, and StandardJS. Let's look into each of them.
Prettier
Prettier is a code formatter that supports many languages such as JavaScript, Vue, JSX, CSS, HTML, JSON, GraphQL, and more. It improves the readability of your code and ensures your code conforms to the rules that it has set for you. It sets a length limit for your lines of code; for example, take a look at the single following line of code:
hello(reallyLongArg(), omgSoManyParameters(), IShouldRefactorThis(), isThereSeriouslyAnotherOne())
The preceding code is considered lengthy...