On Sun 20 Jun, Ralph E. Johnson wrote:

> I do care that you say that style is not important.
> Style is important.  It is not just someone's opinion.  It might start
> out as someone's opinion, but once enough code gets written, it becomes
> part of a culture, and part of the environment.  It becomes objective,
> and we can test for its presence and absence, and for its effects on
> people and programs.  Squeak has a strong sense of style.  If new
> Squeak programmers learn it, they will be able to use Squeak more 
> effectively than they otherwise would.  You are doing a disservice
> to people to tell them that style is optional.
Hear, hear.

There is a practical sense in which style is important as well; if you
write in a manner that *I* [1] find poor style, then there is precious
little chance that you will get any useful help from me in debugging,
reworking etc. Not because I wouldn't try, but because you would be making
it difficult for me by using this bad style. It's somewhat similar to
trying to teach technical writing to someone that insists on using
non-standard spelling, grammar etc.

tim
[1] 'I' in this case should be considered an abstract class representing
the population of people you might wish to ask for assistance at some
juncture.

-- 
Eagles may soar, but weasels aren't sucked into jet engines.
Tim Rowledge:  rowledge at interval.com (w)  +1 (650) 842-6110 (w)
 tim at sumeru.stanford.edu (h)  <http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim>