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Comment by LaGrange | Hacker News Reader

Gods forbid I talk to people I work with, learn their preferences, and figure out the way we can accommodate each other. Sounds like such a waste of energy. It’s so much better if we all acquiesce to the preferences of some people neither of works with!

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You can still talk to them about more important problems than placement of collons and closing bracket.

Actually the aesthetic preferences of people I regularly work with are important to me.

I do not have strong aesthetic preference for code (I always disable "minimap" in editors which shows it because I think about code as symbols shown in "outline"). I would probably not notice reasonable code formatting change if you would do it during my holiday. My requirements for formatting are purely technical (ie. do not make unnecessary diffs on code change). But I have worked with a few programmers who think about code visually. They actually remember code structure and formatting more than text and use "minimap" instead of "outline". They also strongly oppose any automatic formatting and linters. It is fascinating how different some people are despite doing the same work.

How does that work when hundreds of people are working on a project, with a few new people joining every week?

It boggles me that anyone would argue against standardization, or believe that “just get hundreds of people to agree today and tomorrow and every future day” is a better solution.

In my own experience it works pretty well. In fact better than the autoformatters.

It was essentially not an issue. Sometimes I’d grumble about someone, but it would never get in my way the way black or ruff would regularly.

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