On Wednesday, November 20, 2013 12:06:04 Andrei Alexandrescu wrote: > What I meant is there are consistent styles that are objectively worse. > Consistency is necessary but not sufficient.
I agree, but you do come across sometimes as seeming to think that some styles are objectively worse when plenty of other folks would disagree with you (e.g. with regards to how much vertical whitespace is reasonable). I think that in most cases, style ends up being very subjective and not objective at all. IIRC, Walter linked to a blog post a few months back about someone talking about what good coding style looked like, and they were talking about the code for Doom 3 and how beautiful it was, and yet when they showed what it looked like, many people thought that the coding style was absolutely horrible. I think that it's quite clear that what people consider to look good in terms of coding style varies quite a bit. So, while some cases are clearly objectively bad (e.g. all of the code on one line), I think that you're going to have a hard time arguing it objectively in most cases - especially when it comes to legibility, since different people find different styles to be more legible, and what's more legible often comes down to what you're used to seeing rather than anything particularly objective. - Jonathan M Davis
