I’m sorry, but if you sometimes put spaces around parentheses and sometimes you don’t, I just can’t be your friend any more.
I’m talking about source code writing style of course, or rather lack of it. Whenever I open some file that looks something like this …
… I get a sudden urge to punch however wrote that in the face.
If you are writing code like that, you are telling other people that you haven’t got the slightest interest in what you do. I really can’t take you, as a programmer, or your work seriously after you produce an inconsistent pile of poo like that.
Look, I don’t care if you use tabs or spaces, I don’t care if you put curly braces on the same or the next line after an if, etc. But for the love of code, be consistent! Pick a style guide or come up with your own. Just stick to it down to the last miserable white space.
Other than looking more professional and more polished, your code will be easier to read for someone else. Maybe I’m a bit too sensitive about this stuff, but if I have to go through some code that is not properly formatted, I end up thinking about the style and not what the code does.