> erasing all style-based co-ordination problems & arguments & bikeshedding & whatever else from the entire codebase.
Exactly this. I sat across from the poor soul who was assigned to creating the coding standards for our C# stuff. It tooks months. Nobody was happy, everyone had their own way of doing things: var vs. no-var vs. obvious-type-var, CONST_VALUE vs ConstValue. The work has been completed (the person in question quit soon after), people are still unhappy, there are still (and will always be) open questions. People nit coding standards in code reviews instead of looking for real issues. What a shitshow. If you remove autonomy concerning coding standards from the get-go, people never form these opinions.
If code is not optimally pretty, that sucks. Establishing coding standards is an bottomless pit of despair. Almost any opinionated formatter is worlds better than the worthless sisyphian task of establishing your own coding standards.
Exactly this. I sat across from the poor soul who was assigned to creating the coding standards for our C# stuff. It tooks months. Nobody was happy, everyone had their own way of doing things: var vs. no-var vs. obvious-type-var, CONST_VALUE vs ConstValue. The work has been completed (the person in question quit soon after), people are still unhappy, there are still (and will always be) open questions. People nit coding standards in code reviews instead of looking for real issues. What a shitshow. If you remove autonomy concerning coding standards from the get-go, people never form these opinions.
If code is not optimally pretty, that sucks. Establishing coding standards is an bottomless pit of despair. Almost any opinionated formatter is worlds better than the worthless sisyphian task of establishing your own coding standards.