You heard wrong.

Triple-booting OS X, Ubuntu and Windows 7 on a Mac Mini here. There's no secret Evil Apple chip in their machines. I'm not drinking any kool-aid, but at the same time, don't drink the stink-water and assume the worst just because it's Apple (booga-booga!)

See, the flip-side is:

I don't care how good your algorithm is if it's written in an obtuse, unmaintainable manner.

There are plenty of coders (especially those new to the profession) who don't understand the value of tidy code. The smart ones quickly understand and tend to ask for some tips. That's the first (and for me, primary) reason for having a Coding Standards document.

The second reason is to reduce friction when viewing each others' code. Local vars should be 'someVariable'. Instance vars should be '_anotherVariable'. Methods should be 'SomeFunction'. I physically twitch when I see underscores in variable names.

But, a Coding Standards document should be clear on 'must-do' vs recommendations. We state that you should split multiple-clause IF statements tidily to avoid excessive horizontal scrolling. But we only provide recommendations on how to do brace placement.

Every single point in a Coding Standards document should have a defensible reason to be there.

Our CS doc is in a Wiki which lets us have a comment section for each page (and there aren't many pages overall). If anyone wants to ask why something's in there, or suggest an alternative, they're free to. The doc's existed for 9 years and is largely unchanged other than to add explanations and extra languages. We most recently added some docs on SQL stored procedure styling, since ours were abysmal - copying and pasting SQL from Management Studio's view designer is a 'go back and do it again whilst we laugh at you' offence now :)

Now, I'm not a huge fan of nuclear power. Not for the usual "GAAAH! RADIATION! WASTE! YOU'RE MAKING GAIA CRY!" reasons, but because humanity (and more precisely, human bureaucracy) is often far too gaffe-prone to be trusted. Running a nuclear plant isn't amenable to cost-cutting or tight-fisted cost-benefit assessment.

But the way the affected reactors and their operators have performed has been almost perfect. Consider the fact that the buildings themselves are intact after what nature just threw at them. Pretty astounding. Sure, by the look of it, we've already breezed through several failure modes, but reaction has been halted and sea-water is readily available to keep the thing cooled without the core making a bid for freedom. Still, as I understand it, worst-case is the core splurges itself over the inner containment floor and eventually cools anyway.

Of course, there'll be a post-mortem over why standard cooling couldn't be restored, the results of which will be interesting (and no doubt, instructive).