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You're absolutely right. It's about design more than anything else, but at least for the cosmetic details, I feel the current state of affairs is sub-optimal.

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Cosmetic? Visual Studio fixes layout problems in a few keystrokes but it can't fix, say, poorly named variables.

By cosmetic, I mean the pettier details like indentation, method names in bold or underlined, return types on the same line or before the function definition, position of braces, snake case versus camel case, etc.

That I think the editor should take care of. For more serious issues like your example of poorly named variables, there's nothing it could do (and is really the core of the problem, as you pointed out).

This is why it's important that you have a coding standard but not so important what choices it actually makes. Just like you have to pick whether to drive on the right or the left.

Golang apparently enforces a visual style. To a certain extent, Python does as well.

Python really should try harder to enforce visual style. The tab-space munging that you can get away with is horrible.

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