The funny thing is: most languages have a development philosophy completely opposed to TIMTOWTDI, so they are all trying to write a tool for the one perfect formatting style, not a universal tool with enough flexibility for the different styles. The former usually leads to enough segmentation for every effort to die in its infancy, the latter to Perl::Tidy.<p>This is especially apparent with Python with its PEP8 standard -- most formatting tools only deal with PEP8 compatibility and only in one direction. Especially with Python, automated code formatting is mistaken for beautification and thus there is a remark in PythonTidy&#x27;s documentation &quot;Python scripts are usually so good looking that no beautification is required&quot;.<p>I tend to think this is exactly the same thinking that has lead Perl into the mess that&#x27;s slowly being fixed since about 2005 and I cherish the difference between a language community which has had its painful experience with insufficient tooling and learned from it and the one which hasn&#x27;t.