Thoughts on Formatting Code

[Tom Hukins]

On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 10:24:33AM +0100, Tom Hukins wrote:
> I've been thinking about forming conscensus on coding style, or
> dealing with coding style preferences as a group, either at work or
> on an open source project.

I discussed this with Robbie yesterday.  He had some interesting
ideas, but doesn't want to write them down.  So I thought I'd spend
two minutes summarising the bits that I remember:

Developers have their own handwriting style.  Perl gives us "more than
one way to do it".  After a while, you can tell who wrote a certain
piece of code by recognising their handwriting.

Just as we discover new ways of expressing things in natural language,
we experiment with how we write Perl.  Experimentation makes
programming more interesting and allows us to improve by refining our
technique.

Robbie, I hope I haven't mangled your thoughts too badly.

Tom