There's big upsides in producing clean, readable and well commented code. Namely for mainly for maintainability. When you type out large programs without comments and go back to them 6 months down the track to revise them, you'll find that you'll spend some considerable time in recalling what's what. Comments also make your program much more legible to anyone else who reads them. Some languages are case sensitive, Java's one of them, I think this in someways encourages the programmer to adhere to acceptable standards. Indenting your code also improves readability, in my opinion, a fine example of well formated code would be Melanie's, Darrel's & Mister_e's. In the long run, you'll save time and probably end up producing much better algorithms if you go the extra mile to properly format & document your work. Most often, programs written in BASIC that make use of many colons are quite quickly dismissed as "spaghetti code"