Also it's the other way around! Using common idioms builds culture how we structure our code. Then that common culture help make the idioms part of the shared v

Also it's the other way around! Using common idioms builds culture how we structure our code. Then that common culture help make the idioms part of the shared vocabulary. Working with such a large piece of code as the kernel, it's invaluable to have a certain sense of shared ideals how the code should read, and it's probably a good thing to have maintainers that nitpicks about such details. People sometimes say things like "just a matter of taste" as if that somehow made it less important, but taste is probably the most important trait we can share when programming.