> Align everything you can in code
Yes. Makes code easier to read and makes it easier to refactor if you use an editor with column select/multi-line caret.
Yes. Makes code easier to read and makes it easier to refactor if you use an editor with column select/multi-line caret.
Unsigned types, on the other hand, are just evil. Way too many people use an unsigned type because they think it represents an invariant that this value will never be negative, that it has some kind of documentation or safety aspect, but that's just wrong. Unsigned types don't act according to the intuitions of most average programmers, and things as simple as for-loops are incredibly easy to get wrong with them (e.g. think about the most common idiom for iterating backwards in C derivatives). If I had my druthers, mixing signed and unsigned ought to expand the expression to the next larger signed type that can represent the range of both (and error out if there is none), and there ought to be separate subtraction / decrement operators specifically for unsigned types. 'u += -2' where u is unsigned would be a type error - assigning a signed value to an unsigned location.
... don't hate me because I'm beautiful ... :D
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On a more serious note, something I have noticed working on large projects with other programmers, is that if each programmer has their own distinctive style and conventions, then you can tell straight away by looking at it who wrote it, and more importantly who modified it.
Thus if Billy (who is an idiot) modified something written by Sheila (who is like unto the goddess of inspired poetry in wisdom and understanding), and the whole is broken, you can pretty much bet that it is Billy's modification that has broken it, and you can spot his bits straight away, this makes debugging a lot easier.
I think this is one of the more unfortunate side-effects of things like checkstyle and other forms of overly restrictive style enforcement. The more we sand-paper everybody back to the same (low) level of code appearance, the more information is lost for what I like to call "forensic debugging".
That is to say, I don't mind everyone being free to format code how they see fit, just don't be surprised if in rewriting or modifying it, it gets "fixed" differently.
I'm currently doing this right now at work, hence my vehemence. There's even things like this in class definitions:
int const * const FooBar // Yes, that's a tab
(Foo foo, Bar bar)
Edit: Something I hadn't thought of - you mention "rivers of space" - aligning code might make it harder to read for coders with dyslexia: http://uxmovement.com/content/6-surprising-bad-practices-tha...
Regarding your point about unsigned types - If I'm remembering correctly, "Writing Solid Code" had a section about exactly that - nasty bugs caused by things like looping over unsigned integers in reverse.
If your code needs lining up to be legible, you're doing something wrong.