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Comment by secondcoming | Hacker News Reader

I care about style. If I’m reading the same code day in and day out I want it to look nice. Not nice code is a distraction, maybe it’s an OCD or a ‘visual misophonia’, but inconsistency is one of the first things I notice. I truly don’t understand why some people don’t care how their code looks.

I have noticed that some people will present tidy code during interviews and amazingly drop that habit once they’re employed.

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It's not only about it looking 'nice' (although there's that component as well as an added bonus).

Once you've read tons of code formatted with the same formatter, passing the same linter rules and following the same general idiomatic rules, it becomes so much easier to read and review new code that adheres to all the same rules.

This is definitely true. Your eyes tell you that something's off long before your brain figures out what it is.

I passed the style test at work then instantly stopped following any of the rules. My teammates who also don't care approve the changes. We deal with lots of bugs each day, and none of them have ever been because things like using `auto` in C++ when we shouldn't have. There are far better things to spend time on.

And if someone does care about something in particular, often they will contribute to an auto-cleanup tool that makes it a certain way. So there was no reason for me to do it manually.

Which came first, the bugs or the nonchalance!

The bugs of course

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