> Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that he make every word tell.
I apply it to journalism, though. Newspapers have long had "house" style guides to keep things consistent across reporters.
I would consider this more important for writing than art, since reading novels involves much more of a time commitment from your audiences to appreciate, whereas art gives more flexibility in deciding how long your audience wants to spend with it.
However, there's a difference between bad art and writing and bad programming. Bad art and writing lacks appreciation. Bad programming is full of errors, hard to maintain, and runs slow, giving an overall poor user experience.
A distinct coding style does not indicate that the code is surprising or difficult to follow.
A diversity of styles should help overall code quality in an organization because you get to pick and choose the 'best approach'* for a situation, and more importantly, learn from your peers.
* whatever that heuristic happens to be... probably unsurprising and reproduce-able for you. I'd say the heuristic for me is 'concise, read-ably correct'. I've always thought of programming as closer to writing mathematical/logical proofs than anything else. If I can eyeball a program and say 'yup, that does what claims it wants to do,' then it's good. I don't think that heuristic always holds up in practice, simply because successful code-bases blossom proportionally to their success.