Mark Chu-Carroll is a first class programmer and more. He's leaving Google and writes about what's good in it. Here he explains in a very simple way why coding standards are good: http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/2011/07/14/stuff-everyone-should-do-part-2-coding-standards/
He talks just about the coding standards of one firm, so he forgets to talk about a related but in my opinion equally important point. If I take a look at Delphi code, C code, C++ code, I see everything, every coding style, naming convention, and many other differences, that make me harder to read and understand their code. If I take a look at Python code written by ten different people I see much more uniformity. This uniformity is part of the Python culture, its PEP8 http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/ ) is a coding standard that instead of being just Google-wide is language-wide. This allows me to understand Python code in less time, to copy and use functions, classes, modules, packages and libraries written by other people and use them in my code (in C# the situation is intermediate. I see more uniformity compared to C++ code, but less than Python code). Go language even comes with a source code formatter that is used often to format code. I think they have learnt well that Google lesson :-) Even Scala seems about to do something similar: http://drdobbs.com/article/print?articleId=231001802&siteSectionName= Bye, bearophile
