Or does it mean style-of-semantics (if that's even a thing), for example in C#, preferring to define explicit constructors instead of a parameterless ctor and trusting the user to set properties in the post-ctor initializer correctly?
Or use of higher-order/FP techniques (like map/filter/reduce/fold) over explicit for-loops?
The summary says this (note the last remark):
> The results demonstrate that good programmers may be identified using supervised machine learning models, despite that no particular style groups could be attributed as a good style.
Obviously they're not saying, for example, that one particular bracing style is better than another (1TBS tho!), nor that co-incidentally "good" programmers prefer one style over another; but despite knowing what they're not saying, I don't know what they are saying with that...
Anyway, they looked at C++ code and measured things like the number of tabs, number of spaces, number of white lines, avg line length aso (table 2)
Most of which get standardized automatically by the IDE these days.