[foobarian]

The biggest problem I ran into without a code formatter is that team wasted a LOT of time arguing about style. Every single MR would have nitpicking about how many spaces to indent here and there, where to put the braces, etc. etc. ad nauseam. I don't particularly like the style we are enforcing but I love how much more efficient our review process is.

[josephg]

Personally I think a lot of programmers care way too much about consistency. It just doesn't matter that much if two files use indentation / braces slightly differently. In many cases, it just doesn't matter that much.

[tremon]

Problem is, development doesn't operate on the level of "files". The incremental currency of developers is changes, not files -- and those changes can be both smaller and larger than files. Would you rather see different indentation/braces in different files so that the changeset you're reviewing is consistent, or rather see different indentation/braces in the changeset so that the files being changed remain internally consistent? And what about refactorings where parts of code are moved between files? Should the copied lines be altered so they match the style of the target file?

Point being, "different indentation in different files" is never a realistic way of talking about code style. One way or another, it's always about different styles in the same code unit.

[spockz]

Indeed, it doesn’t matter too much, as long as it is consistent.

People running their own formatting or changes re-adding spaces, sorting attributes in xml tags, etc. All leading to churn. By codifying the formatting rules the formatting will always be the same and diffs will contain only the essence.

[josephg]

> > programmers care way too much about consistency.

> Indeed, it doesn’t matter too much, as long as it is consistent.

Um, I think you may have missed my point. Why does it always need to be consistent?

The problems you're talking about only show up when someone runs a formatter over the entire file. One answer is, just don't do that.

[lanstin]

Also your eyes are good at seeing patterns. If the formatting is all consistent the patterns they see will be higher level, long functions unintuitive names, missing check for return success; make bad good look bad is the idea. Carefully reading every line is good but getting hints of things to check more deeply because it looks wrong to the eyes is extremely useful.