M-x format-according-to-company

Many Java developers have a "follow suit" mentality. It's honestly a good thing; it gives the code that we all write a uniform look and feel. It makes a developer naturally write in lowerCamelCase while avoiding Hungarian notation. If a developer extends Exception, they're naturally going to have a strong urge to end their class name with Exception.

It's a pleasant change from the C days when everyone invented this standard. Gone is the era of not picking a library because of their naming scheme (well, mostly gone).

One idiosyncrasy we have where I work is a coding convention that method names should be ordered alphabetically in classes, with the exception of pairing getters/setters together. This convention reminds me of my C days.

Historically, IDEs were nothing more than project management tools with syntactic colour coding, so naturally, finding functions involved a lot of paging around, or just plain old searching if you knew what you were looking for (was it "set_window_border", or "window_set_border"?). Back then, tidying up your code so method names were alpha-sequential only made sense.

Fast forward fifteen years.

These days, my IDE knows more about the interdependencies of my project than I do. It suggests what parameters I want to pass to my methods, and it gets them right. I can search for classes by wildcard, or by acronym expansion; entering "NPE" returns NullPointerException (and a surprising array of other classes whose names shorten to NPE).

Once in the type of my choice, my IDE is there with all the methods sorted alphabetically in a nice, handy side view.

Personally, I prefer the "sorted by conceptual closeness" mechanism. Methods that work together, live together. I know this requires some diligence, and some maintenance, but not much of each.

All that said, I don't think I would enforce any sort of method ordering scheme upon developers. We don't read or write code like we did years ago. Even during code reviews, I tend to follow the logical flow from public methods instead of reading a class linearly from beginning to end.

At least we're not arguing about tabs vs. spaces.....right?