To expand further out: the reason this is a problem to begin with is that virtually all programming languages involve a compiler or interpreter parsing a textfi

To expand further out: the reason this is a problem to begin with is that virtually all programming languages involve a compiler or interpreter parsing a textfile which humans (with the aid of IDEs) must laboriously maintain. Instead of arguing about code format styles, why not change our languages (or at the very least development environments) so that a list (for example) gets parsed, analyzed, and turned into an internal object, and doesn't remain merely a "dead" string of characters. Once lists are "objectified", we should be using tools to modify those objects (similar to how you'd add/remove rows from a spreadsheet, or edit the DOM in your browser's dev tools). How those objects get presented visually to the programmer as source code is irrelevant at that point: Want to show the list a a single line of items concatenated with commas? No problem. Want to see each item on its own line, without commas? Sure. The visual representation of lists just become syntactic sugar, while the actual list itself is embedded in the development environment as an internal object, much as your HTML pages become parsed by the browser into the DOM which you can inspect and modify via the browser's dev tools. We should be coding to build "smart objects," not writing strings of text to be endlessly curated.