Given that context switching is one of the core costs of day to day software development, it's hard to overstate how valuable it is to have code across the code

Given that context switching is one of the core costs of day to day software development, it's hard to overstate how valuable it is to have code across the code base feel "familiar". Little details add up to make a bigger difference than you might expect. I'm not alone in feeling this way - take a look at Google's extensive programming style guidelines some time. https://code.google.com/p/google-styleguide/ https://code.google.com/p/google-styleguide/ Of course, the better answer (and we'll build it at some point) is something like gofmt so that you don't have to worry about this stuff at all.