Community Standards (Clojure)

How hard is it to throw together an Emacs command that re-styles your parenthesis? I know the creators of Go went so far as a to make a program that converts "valid" Go code into "canonical" Go code. Parentheses seem like an easy problem to solve. If people can re-parenthesize their code with the press of a button, you can still have the community interoperability without having to sacrifice inclusiveness of personal eccentricities.

The post mentions Clojure only tangentially. The larger point can apply to any programming language community.

I think Doug Hoyte put it best: "An auxiliary theme of this book, one that applies to any programming language, is that in programming, style is not something to pursue directly. Style is necessary only where understanding is missing."

For instance, as a python programmer, I find it intensely annoying when people don't follow PEP 8 and might complain about it. But the fact that it's the most important thing on my mind means that I haven't really understood the code.

Unless the violations are truly flagrant (such as putting commas in the left margin rather than after the word), then move on with life. We programmers have enough to worry about without having to nitpick over others' paren placement.

The essay itself is a pretty wonderful merging of form and content. At its very best, form helps to convey content. As seen here.

Great. Thank you ;-))

  1) You lose credibility (whether its unfounded or not is irrelevant)
  2) People refuse to spend much time looking at your code

Over the years I've spent coding I've learned not to judge other coders based on their preferred style. Often enough I'll encounter really brilliant code whose style I find aesthetically unappealing (or "non-standard"), and I would have been worse off if I chose to ignore it. Some people just Think Different, and that's not always a bad thing.

Conversely, I've learned that prickly people who get red-faced upon encountering an unfamiliar style are often worth avoiding.