Seriously though, the Go core team has been saying from the start that even they were surprised how big of a positive impact gofmt had. It reduces bikeshedding

Seriously though, the Go core team has been saying from the start that even they were surprised how big of a positive impact gofmt had. It reduces bikeshedding and makes it easier for people to read each other's code because you learn to read the same basic structure fluently and quickly. It's a basic IxD lesson about software tooling that I think more languages should pick up on. Personally, I think I miss gofmt-on-save more than any other feature when I write other languages (gofmt is a lot more robust than autoformatters in most other languages). Being able to type carelessly and quickly and know the output will be corrected as soon as I hit CTRL+S lets me focus on putting my thoughts on the screen. And it even works as a soft-compiler: if the autoformatter breaks it means I have a bug somewhere.