I prefer storing plain text and displaying locally preferred syntax, to a degree.

With some expressions, like lookup tables or bit strings, hand wrapping and careful white space use is the difference between “understandable and intuitive” and “completely meaningless”. In JS world, `// prettier-ignore` above such an expression preserves it but ideally there’s a more universal way to express this.

And the bikeshedding has begun...

What's the nuclear reactor in this analogy?

That the values could have been extracted to an array of structs, and iterated over in a small cycle that calls the function for each set of values.

was going to say the same thing.

Boy that was fast.

Who’s going to be bikeshedding (about formatting) when everyone can individually configure their own formatting rules without affecting anyone else?

And that's fine, as long as whatever ends up in version control is standardized. Locally you can tweak your settings to have / have not word wrapping, 2-8 space indentation, etc.

But that's the core of this article, too; since then it's normalized to store the plain text source code in git and share it, but it mentions a code and formatting agnostic storage format, where it's down to people's editors (and diff tools, etc) to render the code. It's not actually unusual, since things like images are also unreadable if you look at their source code, but tools like Github will render them in a human digestable format.

Is this a subtle pro-tab pinch?

That's why Python should have gone all-in on significant spaces: tabs for blocks, spaces after tabs for line continuation

Mixing spaces and tabs is a surefire way to ruin everything.