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Sorry, I didn't make it clear enough. I was primarily referring to code formatting. Spaces instead of tabs, for example, or not writing opening curly braces on separate lines. These things are a matter of taste and should be friendly recommended at best. Guidelines for idioms are important and should occur as early as possible in the book, so that's perfectly fine.

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I don't think telling you how to format your code for a particular language is a bad thing. I am quite happy using { on a new line in C# but on the same line in JS, using underscore_separated_method_names in C and camelCasedMethodNames in Java. To me, once you've been round the block with more than one or two languages you can get used to whatever style, but using the style for the language that you're writing in is something you should try to do for other people who read your code.

Reading Java code that uses undercore_separated_method_names or C# code that uses camedCased immediately makes me think the author doesn't know what s/he's doing.

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