It's certainly easier on the eyes when they are aligned, but IMHO the benefit is negligible or even irrelevant in a modern programming context.
In Java, it's preferred to declare a variable as close to where it is first used, instead of in the beginning of the block. Java developers are also encouraged to constantly refactor code into simpler and smaller methods. So overall there is less chance of having a long list of variable declarations anywhere.
Where we do have a list of variable declarations, most of them tend to be instantiating objects or calling methods, instead of assigning literal values. Java classes and methods tend to have much longer names, so aligning variables doesn't seem like an economic use of space and would mostly cause more unnecessary line wrapping.
Another practical annoyance from aligning variables is, when you need to add a new, longer variable, you'll have to realign all the variables before it. That messes up the commit diff and authorship on those lines. IMHO in programming these days, the readability of commits and line-based blame/annotate can be actually more important than that of the code itself.
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It's certainly easier on the eyes when they are aligned, but IMHO the benefit is negligible or even irrelevant in a modern programming context.
In Java, it's preferred to declare a variable as close to where it is first used, instead of in the beginning of the block. Java developers are also encouraged to constantly refactor code into simpler and smaller methods. So overall there is less chance of having a long list of variable declarations anywhere.
Where we do have a list of variable declarations, most of them tend to be instantiating objects or calling methods, instead of assigning literal values. Java classes and methods tend to have much longer names, so aligning variables doesn't seem like an economic use of space and would mostly cause more unnecessary line wrapping.
Another practical annoyance from aligning variables is, when you need to add a new, longer variable, you'll have to realign all the variables before it. That messes up the commit diff and authorship on those lines. IMHO in programming these days, the readability of commits and line-based blame/annotate can be actually more important than that of the code itself.