Learning how syntactic consistency affects maintainability

In general, if a single programmer is maintaining the code, whether the code is syntactically consistent or not does not matter. All that matters is that the programmer who wrote the code can read it. In general, programmers tend to write code in a way that makes the most sense to them, even if it may not make the most sense to other programmers. If you are the sole maintainer of the code, you should write the way that feels most natural to you, because that is probably the most productive approach.

However, when multiple programmers are working on the same code, syntactic consistency may become more important, depending on where on the poet-philosopher spectrum each programmer working on the code is. If all of the programmers working on the code lean more toward the poet side of the spectrum, syntactic consistency may still not be important.

However, if a significant portion of the programmers working on the code lean...