Well the choices should be based on data, does method 1 or method 2 result in code which functions longer without needing to be fixed, or updated. There _IS_ d

Well the choices should be based on data, does method 1 or method 2 result in code which functions longer without needing to be fixed, or updated. There _IS_ data about some of this, but the results frequently go against the opinions of various people, so they are discounted. And then there is the problem that the industry as a whole has a tendency to run away from old/stale/well understood/etc technologies in support of untested new products. Which is how you get the cool language churn. You can just look at the last 20 years of server side web development, php, ruby, python, javascript, were all the "best choice" at one point or another, only to be pushed to the sidelines when they were discovered to be sub-optimal in some way. So, its like the C/java/etc brace problem. There were a fair number of actual studies showing that matched brace styles seem to result in fewer bugs back in the 1990's, yet overwhelmingly the opensource community rejects that in nearly every single project regardless of language. Why? Presumably its just personal preference going back to the old days of 80x25 tty's where whitespace was at a premium, same as the 80 column limits many projects employ.