We follow the received notion of “style” in programming, which is implicitly argued to share many of the values of the quantity of the same name in other areas of human expression, such as literary and artistic expressions. We argue that this is not so, and that this correspondence obscures the essential imbalance in power relations in the ecologies surrounding computational artefacts, and also the fundamentally different nature of these styles in structuring dialogues amongst participants. We consider instead that efforts in cataloguing varieties of ``programming styles'' merely succeed in capturing variation amongst imprisoned expressions. We construct a miniature integration language, still bounded within the space of existing programming language styles, to solve an open authorship problem, and observe that the increased open ownership of expressions has come at a significant usability cost. We look forward to more convivial venues and idioms for expressing computational artefacts, with more equal relationships between the ecologies of construction and ecologies of use.