Because I find it really handy to quickly, and visually, check the sanity / logic of something.

In your example, it's really easy to run your eyes down a column and see that one of those values is radically different from the others.

As a trivial example:

    int robert_age = 32;
    int annalouise_age = 25;
    int bob_age = 250;
    int dorothy_age = 56;

I find easier to read as:

    int robert_age     = 32;
    int annalouise_age = 25;
    int bob_age        = 250;
    int dorothy_age    = 56;

Coding styles are about readability and usability. The columns metaphor works well for some categories of data - that's why spreadsheets are so popular.

People waste a lot of time in making things pleasant to look at.

Because emacs does it for me automatically.

The correct term is "horizontal alignment", not "vertical alignment". It's impossible to vertically align code unless you're using a two-dimensional visual programming language.

https://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/javaguide...

Google Java Style

4.6.3 Horizontal alignment: never required

Terminology Note: Horizontal alignment is the practice of adding a variable number of additional spaces in your code with the goal of making certain tokens appear directly below certain other tokens on previous lines.

This practice is permitted, but is never required by Google Style. It is not even required to maintain horizontal alignment in places where it was already used.

Here is an example without alignment, then using alignment:

    private int x; // this is fine
    private Color color; // this too

    private int   x;      // permitted, but future edits
    private Color color;  // may leave it unaligned

Tip: Alignment can aid readability, but it creates problems for future maintenance. Consider a future change that needs to touch just one line. This change may leave the formerly-pleasing formatting mangled, and that is allowed. More often it prompts the coder (perhaps you) to adjust whitespace on nearby lines as well, possibly triggering a cascading series of reformattings. That one-line change now has a "blast radius." This can at worst result in pointless busywork, but at best it still corrupts version history information, slows down reviewers and exacerbates merge conflicts.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/vertical-al...

The vertical-align CSS property specifies the vertical alignment of an inline or table-cell box.

Values (for inline elements)

Most of the values vertically align the element relative to its parent element:

baseline: Aligns the baseline of the element with the baseline of its parent. The baseline of some replaced elements, like <textarea> is not specified by the HTML specification, meaning that their behavior with this keyword may change from one browser to the other.

sub: Aligns the baseline of the element with the subscript-baseline of its parent.

super: Aligns the baseline of the element with the superscript-baseline of its parent.

text-top: Aligns the top of the element with the top of the parent element's font.

text-bottom: Aligns the bottom of the element with the bottom of the parent element's font.

middle: Aligns the middle of the element with the middle of lowercase letters in the parent.

<length>: Aligns the baseline of the element at the given length above the baseline of its parent.

<percentage>: Like <length> values, with the percentage being a percent of the line-height property. (Negative values are allowed for <length> and <percentage>.)

The following two values vertically align the element relative to the entire line rather than relative to its parent:

top: Align the top of the element and its descendants with the top of the entire line.

bottom: Align the bottom of the element and its descendants with the bottom of the entire line. For elements that do not have a baseline, the bottom margin edge is used instead.

but looks nice....