“A good style guide is one of the keys to writing more and faster. Avoiding style decisions alone offers the same sort of speed boost as word processing.” – the Responsible Communication Guide
Programming is fractal decisionmaking. There’s a little bit of typing to express the results of our decisionmaking, and yet there’s a ton of decisionmaking even in that typing. what file do we put it in? what do we call the function? If we are also thinking about how to format the code, that’s yet more decisionmaking that we could have spent on important business decisions like which errors to handle and how.
Style guides are important. Even better is when they’re automated, so that I hit save and poof my code conforms to the style. Then I don’t have to memorize the style guide. This is particularly important when switching between languages or teams that have different style guides.
Automated stylers like elm-format and go-fmt remove obstacles from adding this language to your repertoire.