Writing elegant applications for Arduino Coming from a C background, I was taught that tight loops that just burn CPU aren't desirable.

Is there any programming style guides on Arduino? Is it common practice to just let loop iterate as a tight loop forever?
On a multiprocess system, like your typical desktop, you usually have
way more processes than logical CPUs. When programming such systems you
therefore have to avoid burning more CPU cycles than needed. Instead,
when your program has nothing to do, it should just sleep, and leave
the CPU available for other processes.

On an Arduino, you only have one single program running at a time. It is
then not that useful to keep the CPU idle. Also, the power dissipation
is so low that you will not notice the microcontroller getting even
slightly warm. The extra complexity of getting into and out of sleep
mode is therefore not that useful. Only when running on batteries do you
care about saving every possible milliamp: then learning about sleep
modes starts getting useful.