[munk-a]

Code isn't meant to be read by computers - it's meant to be read by humans (including yourself in three years when you've forgotten everything). Code sugaring and style adherence are vital portions of retaining a maintainable and flexible codebase.

[forgetfulness]

Yeah I know the spirit. I'm saying it amounts to absolutely nothing in readability. If there's any formatting at all, it's structure and not particular whitespace and comma placement conventions that make or break readability, the rest is code quality theater.

[lazide]

It does actually matter quite a bit in readability in my experience - when you have a bunch of noobs, and a bunch of senior folks, and a bunch of interns, and a bunch of contractors all slinging code around for review to each other.

Many folks will get sloppy (in syntax and cleanliness) or misunderstand things - which requires the reviewer be able to clearly and quickly see what they are trying to do to catch that - especially as deadlines approach. The more it slips, the more slipping becomes the norm, and the messier and harder to understand everything gets - which makes later work harder as well.

If what you're showing is the standard, I guarantee 25% or more of the requested changes (which already won't meet whatever standard ANYONE sets strictly when first proposed) will be even worse. If that even worse becomes standard, etc, etc.

Part of their job is to set the 'reasonable' ideal, and attempt to enforce it. It won't happen universally, or even necessarily often, but it pushes things more towards maintainability and obviousness, which is opposite of the normal trend in any group of people. The larger the group, the more of a problem it is, and the harder they need to work to do it.