Well, that's the first time I see such convention. And your argument doesn't quite hold water to me. They put the visibility modifier in its own line, not the function name. It's still next to the return type (or void). So it would still beat your regex. Plus, I'm not exactly sure if any Android devs snap out little regex-based scripts for refactoring or whatnot :) I'm sure it's far from unusual in dynamic languages, but looks like a great YAGNI in this case. I'm not hating it, all I'm saying is it's odd :)