[afandian]

Fair enough. I found that in a collaborative environment (people making and sharing code) the style guidelines had a net positive effect (and believe me, my first gut reaction was along the 'this is insane' lines). As process go, the degree of automation and strict automatic enforcement (and fixing) of rules felt lightweight after a bit.

We're neither of us going to convince the other, I just thought I'd add a datapoint. FWIW I now write Python and although PEP8 isn't as hard-line, I think it similarly does a lot of good.