If programmers all adhere to a single coding standard (including everything from tabs vs. spaces and curly bracket placement to naming conventions for things like classes, methods, and interfaces), everything just works better. It's easier to maintain and extend code, to refactor it, and to reconcile integration conflicts, if a common standard is applied consistently throughout. The standard itself matters much less than adherence to it. Fortunately, modern IDEs make it trivial to apply many kinds of formatting, even after the fact.