To me one of the big benefits of the formatter is that it has so few options. A good chunk of elixir dependencies uses the formatter, so there’s no difference between looking at code I wrote or some third party code. Yes, to get to “one way of formatting” one has to make subjective decisions once, but when they’re taken there’s no need to discuss them further. There are some cases where the formatter doesn’t produce optimal code, but many times I’ve found ways to make it work. Given those are the 1% I’m happy to make those changes to get the benefits for the other 99%.

Think you mean subjective I actually find the formatted version easier to read. It’s easier for me to scan vertically than horizontally and I don’t like long lines. I tend to think one can get used to just about any formatting if you look at it enough, but also agree with others that too many matches in a function head can be hard to parse.

Personally, 9 out of 10 times I see a function clause that spans multiple lines as a code smell. Ask yourself:

• Do you need all of that pattern matching in the function head?
• Can you match some in the body instead?
• Can you write a private guard to reduce matching or guard clauses?
• Can you use a case within a function (or all compiles down to a case anyhow)?