The Lost Art of Right Aligning Code

When I started working with the Go language using Visual Studio Code a few months ago, the Go extension for VS Code auto-formatted one type definition like so:

type ResourceInfo struct {
    ResourceID         string
    SubscriptionID     string
    GroupName          string
    Name               string
    Type               string
    RunID              string
    DocumentType       string
    Location           string
    LocationMisAligned bool
}

When I was a C / C++ developer I created and read right-aligned code all the time. The alignment makes patterns in code easier to find. For another example in Go, it’s easier to see which entries point to a "no-operation" function in the following hash map, because you can scan vertically down the file.

var resourceMap = map[string]func(*ResourceInfo) {
    "Microsoft.Sql/servers":           visitSQLServer,
    "Microsoft.Sql/servers/databases": noop,
    "Microsoft.Cache/Redis":           visitRedisCache,
    "Microsoft.Web/sites":             visitWebSite,
    "Microsoft.Portal/dashboards":     noop,
    // ...
}

Keeping code aligned requires some work, and without tool support it is rare to see the convention in .NET languages. The only tool I've found that comes close to supporting this style is the Always Algined extension for Visual Studio.