| "If you feel that parenthesis stacking actually improves the readability of your code, by all means, feel free to do so! However, "everyone else is doing it" is not a good reason to sacrifice the readability of your code." I think it is a good reason. The community benefits when everyone uses a consistent style. Readability isn't just about being able to read your own code, it's about helping other people read your code. The accepted style of the community will make sense up to a point; no one wants to make things really hard on themselves, and people gravitate toward things that are comfortable. But it'll also be partly arbitrary and probably not optimal in every way. Part of learning a programming language is learning the idioms and dialects of other programmers. Using a style no one else in the community uses is like making up your own words in spoken language. People will be able to understand you given some effort, but are they going to bother? If they do bother, they're probably going to be annoyed. Even if your new words are "better". If you're the only one reading your code, knock yourself out. Otherwise you should probably suck it up and adapt, in my opinion. "No other language that I'm aware of stacks scope delimiters or has a community where the standard indentation width is two spaces wide, and where sometimes even a single space is considered acceptable." Idiomatic Ruby uses two space indentation. Maybe because Ruby is often so deeply nested, like Lisp. |