Programming is also visual design. The first thing that stands out when looking at a block of code is the contrasting outline made between the characters and th

Programming is also visual design. The first thing that stands out when looking at a block of code is the contrasting outline made between the characters and the spacing, and first impressions will be made based on the design merit of that appearance. This is quite intuitive if you take it to the logical extreme. If someone wrote a program that jammed all of the characters together into one long continuous block of text, you would immediately get negative feelings about the work, even without reading a single character. The same holds true even when some care went into the visual design of the code. A codebase that does not present a good visual design will feel difficult to work on, even if it is well written from a technical standpoint.