As someone observed above it's the only win you are likely to get, as ugly often boils down to "something I have seen before".
There a few idioms that are actively helpful or harmful. For example, python making whitespace significant neatly meshes with human visual system. We are really good a picking up changes in indentation, not so good at lining up curly brackets. But best of luck trying to get 1/2 the population to accept that, even though it's objectively accurate.
On the other side, allowing too many levels of operator precedence seems to be harmful. I loved the conciseness when I was young. It was only later I noticed people struggled with some of my code because of it. Pascal (I think?) solved the problem by making combining some operators without parenthesis a syntax error. But since I only used Pascal when I was young, I hated it whenever I did use it.
So yeah, consistency is the only easy win. And as you say it's a big one: consistently formatted code is much easier to read than a miss-mash.
As someone observed above it's the only win you are likely to get, as ugly often boils down to "something I have seen before".
There a few idioms that are actively helpful or harmful. For example, python making whitespace significant neatly meshes with human visual system. We are really good a picking up changes in indentation, not so good at lining up curly brackets. But best of luck trying to get 1/2 the population to accept that, even though it's objectively accurate.
On the other side, allowing too many levels of operator precedence seems to be harmful. I loved the conciseness when I was young. It was only later I noticed people struggled with some of my code because of it. Pascal (I think?) solved the problem by making combining some operators without parenthesis a syntax error. But since I only used Pascal when I was young, I hated it whenever I did use it.
So yeah, consistency is the only easy win. And as you say it's a big one: consistently formatted code is much easier to read than a miss-mash.