Yeah, it was even worse than punched cards! I didn't expect many folks to remember paper tape days. But yes, these more compact brace styles derive from those ancient days. And in ancient days \t was very common although its rare nowadays (thank goodness). Hard disc space was so expensive that \t got used a lot instead of multiple simple space characters. Now a blank, ' ' is so "cheap" that we should use them without regard to cost (number of bytes).

Yes, I do advocate lining up curly braces for major functions. I use McCracken style for logic expressions in any language. I don't know a name for the style I use for Perl "stacks" of list orientated functions.

I have become a disciple of the philosophy that says that the single most important comment that you can put into code is whitespace, be it a blank line or spaces to line things up nicely. Whitespace can separate "thought units" and and also "unite related thoughts into one unit".

There are a number of ways to indent and space out code. But I think that we would agree that it is important to be consistent in what you do. I suspect that we disagree on what that consistent thing should be. But that that it should be consistent and that "\n" is THE most important comment character is something that I hope we agree upon.