What separates good code from great is emphatically not style. It's the fundamental architecture. The omniscient vision to create a program that is somehow much more maintainable, much less likely to have bugs, or much more extensible than dozens of other potential solutions that any competent programmer would agree are "good". Great code can come from a combination of repeated iteration and deep thought, or it can be serendipitous, only emerging as great through the test of time. It's not only great programmers that write great code, and being a great programmer is no guarantee of producing great code consistently. It arises at an ideal intersection of mathematics, cognition, and utility. I hope to write some, someday.
Yeah, when I was a less experienced programmer, I spent a lot of time formatting code. I made everything ultra-nice looking.
But you can only get 10% more readability this way. Any style is readable as long as it is consistent. You get used to reading non-aligned code, and the advantage of faster editing/diffs makes it better IMO to stop aligning it (I used to do that).
The real difference comes when you learn to break down your problems correctly, and control dependencies. Another way of saying this is to make the program structure matches the problem, rather than manually compiling lots of irrelevant details.
Part of the benefit is that you literally will have fewer lines to read. There will be fewer lines of code, and you will have to read and understand a smaller portion of the code to make a given change.
Code formatting is just a small part of maintainability. I agree this article seems "small".
