Agreed, and what's interesting is that despite all of those pointless style debates, there hasn't been much pushback on using reformatters (that I've seen). This tells me that the debates weren't really about "my style is objectively best" but more about "I'd like to use a consistent/predictable style (with preference to mine)."

Quite right, I have not met a lot of people that were actually strongly opinionated about their coding style. They simply did not want to use a tribal one that was not well defined that just added friction to the development process.

+1

...which is why I wish Black allowed more configuration. A team can often agree on a set of styles. Every team on the Python planet agreeing... now that's much harder

I disagree on that though. By sticking to vanilla Black (no pun intended) you ensure that people joining your time will probably already be familiar with the style, you prevent strongly opinionated employees from pushing for changes in the linter config.

Black is opinionated, so it skips the debate entirely. We just use Black, not black with 120 characters lines, just Black.

To each their own I guess, but to me it just seems like pandora's box. Once you show that you are open to changes in the linting configuration, it makes the rules mutable and pretty much guarantees that at some point someone will say "how about we just change this one parameter in the linter", which will probably be agreed by the rest of the team, not because they actually agree but because they don't want to argue.

Yes, it's opinionated, but who's opinion got carved into stone?

That does not really matter as long as the default are somewhat sensible. As far as I can tell Black's are.

gofmt is also opiniated. Someone somewhere picked the defaults and maybe I disagree with those defaults, but in the grand scheme of things, all go code is more approachable because it all looks the same. That to me, is worth a lot more than having my favorite format be the one on top.

EDIT: If you want to discuss the actual merits of Black, you can read their style page that actually explains every choice they made: https://black.readthedocs.io/en/stable/the_black_code_style/...

Does it matter?

Well, someone convinced the Python community that their coding standard should be the one coding standard.

The etymology of black is "any color you like, as long as it's black" [0]. The whole point is that it's _not_ configurable.

[0] https://github.com/psf/black#readme

> A team can often agree on a set of styles.

What for? Just to be clear even Django itself isn't obviously using a configuration, what makes your team so special they need this?

More configuration would allow for more fragmentation...

> A team can often agree

this usually just means new team members are stuck respecting the wishes of the old-timers

Yea, but in this case the old timers have chosen Black so what's the difference?