This is absurd. 90% of the time of most devs is spent reading other people's code. Take any meaninful largish project - linux kernel, git, webkit, node. You wi

This is absurd. 90% of the time of most devs is spent reading other people's code. Take any meaninful largish project - linux kernel, git, webkit, node. You will spend most of your time reading rather than writing. The least you can do to make this process easier is to conform to a reasonable pattern. Imagine a book that uses a different formatting every other paragraph. It's distracting and gets in the way. I think the author is more against nitpicking on coding style. This is unfortunately necessary since most developers cannot even bothered to look at the code above and below to understand the style. If that is the case, how does one trust their code? Coding standards is about basic discipline. If you followed the standard, I know that you are atleast smart enough (and more importantly friendly enough) for a real code review. On a side note, if you spend most of your time generating new code, you get to set the coding standard. But others who change your stuff, should just follow your standard.