[mirrorlake]

> exactly the opposite of what we should expect out of programmers.

I mean this only jokingly: Who gets to decide what programmers are supposed to be like? You?

As someone who tries on a new language every year or two, I love using languages with formatters. Worrying about how many spaces to indent with or other arbitrary things is the opposite of what this particular programmer likes to worry about--I want to jump right in and solve problems with a language, and let the formatter make the code look like it came from a textbook.

[throwawa14223]

I'm arguing for a higher bar. A programming language doesn't need a style czar proposing what is and is not idiomatic. The grammar of the programming language already does that, and we need to trust people to do engineering and decide for themselves how to use that grammar.

[andrekandre]

  > we need to trust people to do engineering and decide for themselves how to use that grammar.

i agree with this very much, but one snag point in a lot of projects is when people do pull-request reviews and there are disagreements about "what is readable" or "easy to understand" then a lot of time gets wasted going back and forth so having a style-czar approved format can make things smoother because there isn't much to argue about any more