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Comment by iraqmtpizza | Hacker News Reader

fixing whitespace is something to do while thinking about the code. unless you can't do two things at once in which case it's a problem. either way, autoformatting doesn't magically make you engineer faster unless your company enforces a style in a really fascist and pedantic way

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Autoformatting makes me faster because I don't have to think about it at all. All of the code in the codebase looks pretty similar and it opens up a sliver more mental RAM

If anything, each chunk of code having its own distinctive structure would make the code easier to visualize. If all the code looks the same then you have no landmarks. Do you not visualize code?

I do visualize it but the logic is the landmarks. It's like living on a grid system such as in Utah or New York but you still know where Times Square is and how Broadway connects everything

You cannot know the logic prior to reading and understanding the code unless you recognize the code immediately on sight. That is my point. If I see a nested ternary expression with beautiful indentation, I know I've scrolled too far when I'm looking for a certain method.

Method names are not logic. You really don't use distinctive method names or formatting to orient yourself and your colleagues? That sounds awful.

I misunderstood what you meant then. Obviously I use descriptive names and different styles of elements inherently have different shapes to them but I don't choose to add extra lines or change spacing just to make something look distinct. As I scroll through I see blocks, names, fors, lambdas, these form the shapes of different bits of code. The baseline formatting of each of these elements is uniform though

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