I think you present a false dichotomy. A distinct coding style does not indicate that the code is surprising or difficult to follow. A diversity of styles sh

I think you present a false dichotomy. A distinct coding style does not indicate that the code is surprising or difficult to follow. A diversity of styles should help overall code quality in an organization because you get to pick and choose the 'best approach'* for a situation, and more importantly, learn from your peers. * whatever that heuristic happens to be... probably unsurprising and reproduce-able for you. I'd say the heuristic for me is 'concise, read-ably correct'. I've always thought of programming as closer to writing mathematical/logical proofs than anything else. If I can eyeball a program and say 'yup, that does what claims it wants to do,' then it's good. I don't think that heuristic always holds up in practice, simply because successful code-bases blossom proportionally to their success.