It just shows that the author is an intermediate-level programmer at best, if his main concern about the 'beauty' of code is in how it's formatted (spaces vs tabs! K&R vs Allman braces!) and whether it's const correct. Throw in a sprinkle of complaining about silly comments (because obviously there are armies of people out there defending documenting getter/setter functions...) and the obligatory 'templates are bad because I don't understand them', and you have yet another cookie cutter programmer link bait blog post polluting the general internets.

Considering the codebase is around a decade old, how many code formatters existed for C/C++ back then?

I am asking because I've only used gofmt to format Go code and infact it was gofmt which introduced the whole concept to me.

Astyle seems to have been around that long, I imagine pure C formatters have existed for much longer. They've got a lot in common with a language parser so if you've got a compiler you're most of the way there.

http://astyle.sourceforge.net/notes.html

I think Go is pretty unusual in that gofmt is provided with the language. So all Go everywhere looks the same. It's awesome isn't it? :)

I can remember using AStyle in ~2003. I think it's a little older than that.