Code that falls in line with your expectations and caters to your mental toolkit is easy to understand. It also helps when code works well with your existing p

Code that falls in line with your expectations and caters to your mental toolkit is easy to understand. It also helps when code works well with your existing programming environment. I work with Java programmers and C++ programmers, and they both have ways of jumping quickly to class and method definitions, but the C++ programmers' way -- incremental search -- only works within a single file. The Java programmers barely notice that they're hopping around in the filesystem like Q-bert. The C++ programmers, working in emacs and vi, come to a grinding halt when they need to hop around to many different files in different directories, probably because they almost never need to do that. (It may seem like the Java programmers simply use more capable tools, but most of them don't use incremental search at all, so they're much slower at finding something that they don't have a hop-to-X button for. Why? Because they get by fine without it, just like the C++ programmers get by without learning whatever emacs or vi extension would help them navigate Java-style source directory hierarchies.) Obviously some kinds of tools and programmers will be more common than others, so one style can be empirically better than another yet be worse for a particular group of programmers. There won't be one better way of writing code until everybody has the same expectations and the same tools. I don't think we ever want to reach that kind of consensus.