When we started work on Mojo we pretty quickly developed a consistent coding style and made new developers stick to. As a result the code is pretty much formatted identically everywhere. It's a good thing to get this issue sorted out at the initial interview time. If someone won't format their code to a pre-agreed standard then they will probably not do a lot of other things that are required in order to have an orderly software development process.
The selection of which style to use is a religious debate and thus should be decided by the wise benevolent dictator. Another good policy is not to allow debate on programming style during work hours. Outside work hours you can code however you like but don't waste time whining about how much you don't like the decided upon style while we are trying to get some work done.
I'm convinced that inconsistent formatting and debates about which format to use are much bigger time waster than the gain or lack of productivity between one style or another.
Posted by stuartcw at November 27, 2002 04:37 PM