I would like to know if questions regarding readability/coding conventions are on-topic here.
I'm learning a new language, and in the official documentation they routinely add whitespace in a way that reads very strangely to me. I was going to just go with it, but then I saw that about 70% of tutorials and code snippets online remove the odd whitespace, and only about 30% do it the prescriptive way.
My question is essentially "is there an actual reason (readability, etc.) to follow the prescriptive convention, or is this something stylistic that doesn't really matter?"
Sometimes little things really do make a difference (ex. in some languages ALL_CAPS means I'm probably looking at a constant, and that's an actual readability improvement when everyone follows the same convention), and sometimes they don't (ex. I always put my {
on the line after the function declaration, and some people will fight to the death that that's a wasted line, but it doesn't actually affect people's ability to read your code).
So, are questions like this appropriate here?