The obsessive compulsive in me hates the 'brace on same line' style. It feels like you're deliberately starting something on the end of a sentence. Start a statement/block at the start of a line, that's easiest for most of us to read. I think. (If that paragraph was a little harder to read than normal, my point is made). There's a good case for the vertical compression that the K&R style offers, showing more code on screen at the same time makes it easier for the reader to take in more at once. Ideally, he/she should be able to see any function/method onscreen at once. Conversely, if you have nested blocks, I find the Allman style far clearer in determining which brackets match with which. Ideally the editor would just display according to the preferences of the viewer, but as per the js example above, it's probably not always feasible. I don't know if source-comparison tools are smart enough to determine "nothing changed apart from indentation/non-printing characters, so mark nothing as changed".