I've rarely thought of formatting in Go (occasionally wishing it would allow 1 line if statements). But this forgoes many possible optimizations. We don't get fun stories of 30x improvements! (And Go could be optimized a lot, the main compiler implementation foregoes most possible optimizations because the team prioritizes keeping it simple to enable long term refactoring.)
But then in Python I remember tab or space battles, in C you have endless formatting battles which they call coding styles etc. etc. I've never worked professionally in it but it seems like you get people using random build tools... Which are constantly improving! Yet the constant churn horrifies me, seems like it would take up a lot of mental space. Is that true in practice?
LISP (well, Scheme (well, Racket)) is a weird middle ground. Formatting e.g. seems like a solved problem, built into the IDEs with similar behavior since IDK when (I've never thought about it.) Overall, you sort of create tooling while programming. In Common Lisp, substantial tooling is also built into the professional IDEs. The compilers also do quite a lot.
I say every language should standardize on an extremely opinionated formatting tool, whatever those opinions happen to be. To the point where source code should be considered to have a canonical representation. Get rid of the sheds and bikes.
Unfortunately, there are often 14 competing standards...
Bike shedding is when people spend too much time discussing trivial issues, like what color to paint a bike shed, instead of focusing on more important matters. It happens when it's easier to have an opinion on simple, minor issues than on complex, major ones.
Yak shaving is when you find yourself doing a series of unexpected tasks just to solve an original, simple problem. Imagine wanting to fix a leaky faucet, but you end up needing to buy a new wrench, then fix your car to go to the store, and so on—like a chain reaction of tasks just to get back to fixing the faucet.
TL;DR: bike shedding is fussing too much over small details, while yak shaving is getting sidetracked by a chain of tasks that are needed to solve your main problem.
Either way, it looks like an interesting development!
