[kinonionioa]

Writing good code requires good taste. Taste is subjective and cannot be easily codified. That doesn't make it arbitrary. Ask ten people about their favorite movie and they'll name ten different films, but I'd wager no one will say "Gigli".

[bumby]

“All [clean codebases] are alike; each [ugly codebase] is [ugly] in its own way.”

-Leo Tolstoy

[throwaway2037]

I agree. The hardest thing I had to learn as a professional programmer: There are multiple styles of good taste. You need to be tolerant. When I look at some GitHub code reviews, I cringe at the number of pure aesthetic (aka low value) issues that people endlessly nitpick about. It is discouraging towards contributors.

I work on a team now where the three main contributors (including myself) all have _reasonably_ different programming styles (naming, whitespace, structure, const/immutable, algos). Having read enough code from the other two: I am confident they are good programmers, but their style is different from mine. Still, we try very hard to accommodate each other's style. When we make changes, we try to stay with the current style in the class / method. It has been a real learning experience for me.

[munksbeer]

This would be a hard no from me. I cannot stand having to switch style when working on the same codebase or even in the same company.

codestyle enforcement via pre-commit hooks or CI build failure is the way to go. Trying to adpat to codestyle is a distraction. All distractions should be removed when coding.

[shiroiuma]

That's a bad analogy. People will certainly have different favorite movies, but they can also come to agreements on what's a "good" movie. There are a bunch of movies that I think are "good" movies in a more objective sense, but aren't my favorite things to watch. There are movies that I thought were excellent, but I have no desire to see again.