Style guides are a notorious time-sink where people will spend enormous amounts of time debating various conventions without that being linked to measurable benefits. One of the big problems here is that people notoriously conflate “familiar” with “better” and you rarely run the counter-experiment showing that after a couple weeks everyone would be familiar with any of the serious proposals.

The advantage of a tool like Black is that it avoids that constant bikeshedding and the fact that it actually does the work for you puts the conversation in a different light because the option which is the least work is just letting Black format the code. Whatever you pick for style, you really want automatic formatting to avoid it seeming like a chore.

> Style guides are a notorious time-sink where people will spend enormous amounts of time debating various conventions without that being linked to measurable benefits.

It feels like we're trying to justify the continued employment of uncooperative, contrarian egoists. Pick a style and use it or they can go find another job to waste time debating nonsense.

There's some truth to that but I think it's more than that. This comes up all of the time in the UI world: if you ask people their opinion on something in the abstract, they'll often provide a ton of ideas but if you give them something which they can use now they'll probably either say it's okay or come up with a much smaller list of things they actually care about. Things like style guides are especially tricky here because people have opinions but they don't get a bill for changes — having a formatter available can shift that dynamic to where you can basically say “Black does this for free every time you hit save. Are you willing to build a tool which maintains that level of effort?”

I've had that happen a few times and the number of people who will volunteer opinions has consistently been at least an order of magnitude larger than those who are willing to contribute something like linter or formatter configuration.

Once they're all fired, there will be no one left to do the work.

On this particular small team, there was no style guide, and nobody could agree on what would go in it. It was dysfunctional.