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Comment by PunksATawnyFill | Hacker News Reader

The solution isn't to force style on programmers within the language. It's to fix the shitty diff tools that flag whitespace changes as significant.

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when people care whether you have

    if(foo) {

    if (foo) {

    if (foo) 
    {

you end up in pointless arguments. I don't care about this sort of formatting very much (I have my own default style developed over years), but I do care when other people care about it, often to the exclusion of other factors.

"but we need these tools so that we don't argue about how to format code". Well... you could... just not argue about it in the first place.

Disagree. There's value in consistency, even for the shallow matter of formatting. There's a reason so many large-scale software-development companies care about coding standards.

You're right that it's not a matter of there being one true style. I agree with Kevlin Henney though that there are certainly wrong ways to format code - https://youtu.be/ZsHMHukIlJY?t=1027

I think it's not at all pointless to have consistent code style throughout codebase. I agree, though, it's pointless to argue (thus losing time) about "correct" style. It should be enforced on project or company level, no discussions between developers there.

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