Ask HN: Examples of Unusual Code Formatting Styles?

The recent discussion [1] on the Black formatter for Python had me thinking about whether there is any innovation still happening in the realm of code formatting. Most of the possible ways to format code in each language must have been tried by now, and I would expect we've converged on a narrow range of permutations purely for practical reasons. But recently I did see an interesting example [2] of Java formatting from the Boot library for Clojure, with a style that I had never seen before in that language.

Are there other major variants of code formatting style still being developed out there?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30130315

[2] https://github.com/boot-clj/boot/blob/master/boot/base/src/main/java/boot/App.java

Historically it was common advice to avoid elaborate code formatting, as keeping up such formatting by hand was tedious, time consuming, and inconsistent, compared to the value add.

Given near all code (let's say for large projects) is authored with IDEs, elaborate formats can be applied consistently and automatically, at little or no cognitive or typing cost.

To me the question is then if such formatting can increase the legibility of the code. The grid of static variable declarations in [2] is nice, but I wonder if sorting the variable lexicographically would make it easier to read/find a var by name?

Not sure how splitting method signature names onto a second line helps, though.

I've seen this in the wild and have been meaning to ask:

With the availabily of syntax highlighting including color, has anyone seen merit in skipping indentation altogether?

For that matter, what if block color or font size took the place of indentation (under control of syntax highlighting). I'll have to try it by hand.

I find the Horstmann indentation style [1], in which code is placed on the same line as the opening bracket, simultaneously disturbing and compelling. If it ever ends up added to clang-format as has been requested [2], it might become more popular.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentation_style#Horstmann_st... [2] https://bugs.llvm.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27263

Oh my God, I think I like it.