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Im not sure how it's even remotely related to testing. I do agree that it depends on the person, just like every medium depends on both the artist creating the work and the patrons viewing it.

Many people who use formatters (myself included) just want consistent code and don't want to bicker with others about it. When it is soley owned by me and I'm doing it for fun, these reasons fall away for me.

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It meant to illustrate the same human weakness in consistency and repeatability disadvantages both manual testing and manual formatting. In essence manually formatting is a baker making every bread by hand. Some bread will be better then others. In contrast to an automated factory turning out the same quality bread every day.

Ah, makes sense. I think there are use-cases for both, even personal hobby projects. There's some languages with so much damn syntax that I don't think I could even begin to write code without a formatter (I'm looking at you rust and Java) and others where it stays out of your way (python, Lua, etc)

A language with semantic white space seems a somewhat strange choice for an example of when formatting stays out of your way.

Fair enough! I only wrote it early in my career, it might feel more restrictive now

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