This is one of my most loathed developments in "best practices" lately. I see it everywhere and it just adds noise, since it doesn't change the functionality of the code. It's like adding a comment on every flow control statement. A concrete example is try/catch, which forces the user to add superfluous curly brackets.

In fairness, I have hit the "goto" style of bug he talks about in switch commands, when I forgot to add a break statement. But I can't remember a single time in my programming career when I added a line to an if/for/while and broke something.

I think people are wasting their energies on subjective topics like telling people to use spaces instead of tabs, or putting { on the same line as the flow control statement, or even telling people how much whitespace to use between () and where.

What we really need is a standardized formatter for any language that works like Google's Go Format. Programmers should not be spending time refactoring code just for looks. If anyone knows of a utility that does this and is easily configurable for personal taste, I would sure appreciate it. Being able to convert /* */ comments to // and back again would be a plus.