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> It’s better to throw coding standards out and allow free expression.

Yez, n we shud be lowed to spel wrds any wy we pleez.

Standards have a purpose. They serve a purpose in prose, where abandoning them leads to a decrease in communications effectiveness, and they serve a more important purpose in collaborative software development, where understanding the code's meaning is difficult even when everyone speaks the same language in the same way.

On one end of the spectrum, the small extra effort expended in adhering to coding styles and conventions means your code will be comprehensible to your successor, after you're long gone.

On the other end of the spectrum, without any consistent standards in force, you won't even be able to understand your own code six months from now.