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I agree completely with this. After fighting over code formatting for so long (often starting those fights myself), I have thankfully come to realize that what format you use almost never matters, only that you use some standardized format.

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And in the case of go that standard is language wide, not just project, team, or company wide.

Except the go standard is awful, so a language-wide formatting requirement with bad defaults makes the language basically unusable (since programs are made to be read, not run).

I think that's one of the best contributions golang has made to the programming world. The idea that the language itself should be easy and unambiguous for the compiler and the human to parse. And that a single formatting standard makes life easier for everyone.

If we ever move beyond using text files for storing code, we could eliminate formatting differences entirely... but efforts in that direction have run into many issues in the past.

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