My experience has been the opposite. Most mediocre to bad developers are so happy that their code works AT ALL that they pay little to no attention to things like sensible variable names and whitespace conventions. We sometimes call these things, "code smell."
I've always thought on the contrary that "code smell" refers much more to the patterns used and not so much how it was formatted. Anyway, choosing a language that has automatic formatting (Go for example) renders about 80% of comments in this thread about "linting" and "formatting" and blah blah blah completely irrelevant.
