"they remove a lot of useless arguing". It is not like I have not heard this argument before. Unfortunately I have also experienced how it works out in practice

"they remove a lot of useless arguing". It is not like I have not heard this argument before. Unfortunately I have also experienced how it works out in practice. It goes more or less like this. "No, your desired change to the coding style cannot go into the formatting rules because we want to prevent useless arguing so we follow such-and-such style guide to the letter." "Actually, you are not follwing such-and-such style guide to the letter because you these formatting rules are actually not according to such-and-such style guide". "Yes, we decided to have these changes because we think they are good". Utterly despicable. So besides the useless comments I also have that experience described in the previous paragraph. And to top it all off, another 'nice' experience with style guides was being forced to used the long discredited 'hungarian notation' which at the time was already long past its expiry date with not really anyone competent believing it to be a good thing. Maybe my bad experiences are not typical but I have had so many bad experiences with style guides that I am now at the stage where I consider anyone enforcing a style guide to be my personal enemy and most likely a despicable person.