allowing each programmer to set their own display formatting options entirely independently of the underlying codebase. That's the easy case. The hard case is

allowing each programmer to set their own display formatting options entirely independently of the underlying codebase. That's the easy case. The hard case is situations where the formatting (whitespace, etc) is not simply some deterministic function applied to the AST. For example: comment placement and tabular layout of repetitive constant definitions. Or situations where vertical alignment is used to call out parallel structure. Mathematicians have been using horizontal alignment to call out important structure in equations (both written and typeset) for hundreds of years. Here's are two examples if you don't know what I'm talking about: https://kagi.com/proxy/ILVap.jpg?c=085W0W0Vgv9kix8Uo-TAMYM_FT1u23UFqHfiq4zyoC7SNFxXinp9WqjiTM14lkaA https://kagi.com/proxy/ILVap.jpg?c=085W0W0Vgv9kix8Uo-TAMYM_F... https://kagi.com/proxy/Zr5re.png?c=085W0W0Vgv9kix8Uo-TAMb-ZJ9tlIOckKNxTWVDXFV8DwbMWKEFKbX9zuX2S1K7U https://kagi.com/proxy/Zr5re.png?c=085W0W0Vgv9kix8Uo-TAMb-ZJ... The people who stubbornly insist that programmers have no need for this sort of expressiveness seem like innumerate cavemen, frankly. They cheapen our field, reducing it from informatics to mere keyboard labor. The urge to run code formatters is a "language smell" indicating that your language has way, way, way too much odd and irregular syntax. See Haskell for a counterexample. Sure, there are a few code formatters for Haskell, but nobody really uses them. The language's syntax is so minimal and clean that there just aren't all that many preference-based choices to be made.