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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.

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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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