For me personally, the simple whitespace schemes for expressions like you usually find in style guides actually slightly hinder readability. I don't mind sticking to them as the majority seems to benefit from them. Though I suspect that some people who get annoyed by others not sticking to them, mistakenly use "conforms to the style guide" instead of the more sensible "helps me" as their metric. But that's just me speculating. For me readability of short expressions benefits from more whitespace, long expressions from whitespace grouping logical blocks. But I seem to be rather alone with this view and as I said don't mind sacrificing my own readability if it helps the majority. (And here we are, another whitespace discussion :)).