If you ride a bike every day, bike sheds are rather important.

If you write and edit and read and search code every day, code formatting is rather important.

DonHopkins 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

You're missing what the bike shedding metaphor is about. It's not about having bike sheds or not, it's about coloring bike sheds, which every day bike riders in their right mind really don't give a shit about, because it doesn't affect their life in any tangible way.

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Moomoomoo309 4 days ago | parent [-]

No, the original metaphor is they were planning to build a nuclear reactor and they spent significantly more time than expected on the details of the bike shed because it was simple to understand and change, unlike the details of the reactor which were complex and required expertise and had lots of constraints. Who cares what color the bike shed is, we're building a nuclear reactor here!

	▲	anonymars 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		"Sigh, this guy is pedantically missing the...oh" Took me a sec, but well played
	▲	einpoklum a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Indeed, that's the original metaphor. The thing is, we are not building a nuclear reactor here, we're building a bike transport system. :-\

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genericspammer 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The point is that in the large picture there are many much more important topics with higher impact to focus on. The company wont make much more money by having consistently formatted code, compared to putting that energy towards new features.

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onion2k 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Consistency is important because it helps you pattern match.

What the pattern is doesn't really matter.