In case anyone wonders why someone might answer "both" (other than an entirely undisciplined approach):
Tabs for line indentation, spaces for every other kind of alignment is one philosophy. It's the one that seems to hit the sweet spot for most of the issues that I care about (cross-editor consistent yet flexible management of line indentation depth as controlled by hits of the tab key + tabstop setting).
But if you're running the project and decide spaces are The One True Way™, I'll figure out a way to get the editor to do it for me and ask you for a raise for the trouble (and, of course, market standards). ;)
> Nobody actually presses spacebar 4 times to indent unless they are forced to use vim on some remote machine.
Totally, hazard pay factor. ;)
..but I do it because of habits learned in python shell and also because of that cowboy character on the Simpsons cartoon that called himself OCD about the number 4 and then counted 1,2,3,4 tapping his foot and shooting his gun into the air.
That was only necessary in Python shell briefly because of a bug. The bug was supposed to be a release blocker, but accidentally got marked incorrectly. It's fixed now, and has been for some time.
How entirely intuitive and not-awkward compared to hitting delete.
> they are forced to use vim on some remote machine.
Vim is not exactly unpopular as an editor of choice.
But overarching all that -- the ;) at the end of my comment should have been a clue that I was not sincerely arguing that figuring out how to use spaces for tabs is an involved task. Even somebody using vim (whether forced or by choice) should know `:set expandtab`. Most editors worth investing in will provide a convenient way of doing this.
Rarer are the editors that will also let you change indentation width on the fly while expanding tabs to spaces, though, which is generally easy if you use tab characters for indentation. I'm not super familiar with VSCode, but having just fired it up and tried it out, maybe it can do this if you turn on Detect Indentation, though it doesn't seem to be the default, and I haven't put it through the paces for less trivial cases.
Plus, once you know a lot of shortcuts, `shift` seems to be sort of a negating key so it actually starts to be intuitive. (i.e. in vim, if you are searching for a string, "n" will move to next match, "shift+n" will move to previous match)
> > they are forced to use vim on some remote machine.
> Vim is not exactly unpopular as an editor of choice.
I think by "some remote machine" he's implying "default configuration", because vim can be configured to insert spaces; I would know, I have mine set up that way.
I answered "both" because I'm not running all of the projects I'm working on and some of them prefer tabs and others spaces - so I just go with the convention that that particular project uses.
The problem with “tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment” is that it voids the claimed tab-benefit of “anyone can configure tabs to be whatever width they want”.
So the number of people that prefer spaces far outweighs the tabbers.
Now, take the pool of people that use spaces and tabs and let them compete for a 100k job. 9 times out of 10 even if randomly hired it will be a space person.
Also, as a by the way, on the medium post. The reason Java has so much tabs is specifically due to the default Eclipse formatting that prefers a mix Tab/Space approach. Which is absolutely horrifying in my personal opinion. I don't have any numbers but Eclipse probably holds 80%, followed by Netbeans and/or IntelliJ. (both of which default to spaces)
> Take the pool of people that use spaces and tabs and let them compete for a 100k job. 9 times out of 10 even if randomly hired it will be a space person.
But you'll get the same result when they compete for a job that pays poorly. If all other factors were equal, the distribution of developers who prefer tabs should match that of developers who prefer spaces.
By your argument, people named Steve would make less money, because they're outnumbered by people not named Steve.
This could still be true though. There are more likely to be outliers in the large group than in the small group. However, there is a lower bound on the number (nobody makes below $0), but no upper bound. So the distribution is likely to be skewed.
So yes, people named Steve would make less money (though this argument might not work as well for people named Jeff, Warren or Bill I guess).
I am not sure exactly what your argument is, but it doesn’t sound correct. The differences will be larger in the smaller group, but the expected value for the average pay in a group is independent of its size. That’s why you can use a sample to find out something about a population.
Very true, but something is still askew - the same will happen for women, minorities, etc.. Any time a large group and a small group, technically the small group tends to get less pay! What's going on? (I totally concede to your point, but now I'm left confused and wondering!)
Edit - ahh, hencq has a reasonable explanation for that.
Well, women and minorities are totally different case, not some general case of "the small group tends to get less pay".
For one, women are more than men (slightly, around 51%, but more. And if not more, equal). So it's not true that "the small group tends to get less pay" in this case. Women are less only in some jobs (like IT). There are more women than men in others (e.g. in education it's over 60% women). But even in those jobs women might be paid less than men.
Second, women and minorities being paid less can be explained by many factors, from discrimination, to women (either naturally, or by nurture) not pursuing promotions/raises aggressively enough, to exploitation (e.g. since some minorities are in bad condition socially, or might be afraid of deportation etc, one can exploit that to pay them less, "take it or leave it"). These practices of course can not be the case with tabs/spaces.
Third, there are countries where the majority gets less pay. E.g. in South Africa the whites are paid more than blacks, same for other countries with a smaller more privileged citizenry and a wider base of rural/indigenous/colored/etc population.
>So the number of people that prefer spaces far outweighs the tabbers. Now, take the pool of people that use spaces and tabs and let them compete for a 100k job. 9 times out of 10 even if randomly hired it will be a space person.
Err, is the distribution is only affected by the number in each category (and not e.g. tab/space preference), then you'd be able to sample the same results for 30k jobs. 9 times out of ten it will be a space person there too.
Thus, if the 28,657 survey respondents are also randomly distributed, the ratio of poor vs good paid would be the same as real life, as would be the ratio of tabs vs spaces.
In other words, one wouldn't expect a skew in one category in favor of the other (if the choice wasn't a factor). Of course correlation != causation, but correlation can point to causation, or to a third, unknown factor that correlates with both attributes.
tabs don't work when you visually align code. e.g.
some.method(param,
param2,
param3)
The above doesn't work if the creator of the code uses a different tab width than I do. If you want it to, you need to use an IDE that automatically recognizes the difference between indentation and alignment... which is frankly too much trust in others if you care about it.
If a default install of an IDE (including vIM) will screw up your code.... you might consider rethinking your strategy. :-)
That would be how I would do it, because generally the coding I do is simple enough that I can trust Visual Studio Code to "Beautify" my finished work and insert all the tabs it needs to align things.
I prefer spaces purely out of consistency reasons.
Some systems say a tab is 8 spaces, others say it's 4. Some editors can set a tab to any customizable N spaces. But a space is always a space so your code will look like you intended (or should I say indented) it no matter who's looking at it.
While I agree with you personally, I could see the counterargument of: A tab is always a tab, and I can tweak my IDE to render a tab as however many spaces I like (2, 4, 8, etc) without changing the code.
This is a good point. Maybe at some distant point in the future we will softly decouple formatting from code by delegating it all to finely tuned autoformatters, or totally decouple it by storing code in a slightly more abstract form such that whitespace rendering becomes largely a presentation preference.
> I can tweak my IDE to render a tab as however many spaces I like
Sure, IDE's are easy (though many people use multiple IDE's and/or editors across multiple machines).
I've also got a couple diff tools, a few VCS's, also the online parts of VCS like web-based pull request review UI's.
Tabs also tend not to play as nice with vertically aligned elements, if you prefer that for things like say the '.' on multi-line chained method calls, or longer function parameter lists.
I'm a tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment person myself. A multi-line statement should have the same number of tabs on each line. Any line after the first should then have spaces as needed.
I'll work without complaint or changing it with any existing code whether spaces or tabs. Mix the two for indentation however and fixing it is the first commit I make before touching anything else.
I don't understand this reasoning, I can set my editor to show x-spaces at the beginning of a line as however many I want. So I can make code indented with 2 spaces look like it was indented with 4.
That approach doesn't work if you use spaces both for indentation and alignment, you'd only want to multiply the indentation spaces. What editor has that setting?
Those salaries are painfully low. I started at 75k. Who's making less than 50k and in such great numbers? This must be non US jobs? I question this data.
Or give up the fight over formatting in general and adopt a tool like [0] Black, which has no rules or options to configure and only one correct style. _You can have any any style you want, as long as it's black._
That is an old post (June 2017). I thought it was now accepted that people should use tabs, until I read the comments here. From a recent post, Nobody talks about the real reason to use tabs over spaces, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20341354; if you're visually impared, using spaces make for poor accessibility. Don't be a dick, use tabs!
IANADS, but this one is actually pretty easy to explain.
Using tabs is stupid. Therefore, people who prefer using tabs tend to be stupider than people who prefer using spaces. Generally speaking, stupider people make less money than less stupider people.
This is one of the strongest cognitive dissonances that I have. And I have no idea why it exists. I know that rationally, tabs are really the better choice. Each user can choose how to display code in their editor.
But I just hate using them.
Maybe it was the 8 space default of vim (nano?) when I was sysadmining. Maybe it was that there was inertia, and tabs are always the thing that's causing problems. But I just can't get over it. I just don't like tabs.
I really think the split is almost purely a generational thing. If your first exposure to computers/coding was using a terminal, I think you will end up leaning towards spaces. If you grew up in the post GUI world on Windows or Mac, I think you end up leaning towards spaces.
Purely a guess, but I think that spaces vs tabs is a proxy indicator of some psychological difference. Perhaps it is conscientiousness. On some editors, you have to go out of your way to change tabs to spaces. If you're very picky about how your code looks and want it to always look the same in every editor and to everyone, then maybe you use spaces. Personally, I do ascii diagrams and even arrows inside of comments to point to different variables and make comments on active code. I am very very picky about how my code looks. I know code aesthetics isn't a be all end all, but maybe it could be some psychological tendency like this. Also, I'm not a paragon of big bucks or awesome, revolutionary code. Over time, perhaps conscientiousness or fastidiousness keeps you employed or people give you more responsibility and money.
Presumably the second one was supposed to say "leaning towards tabs".
I think you're onto something. In old-school editors there wasn't an abstraction layer between the characters and the way they were displayed. You were moving bytes themselves, so a character byte that took up multiple columns but which you couldn't edit the middle of must have seemed gross and unnecessary.
In today's world there's more abstraction, so people are more comfortable with abstraction. I use a font that merges "=>" into a single two-column-wide arrow, because it's more pleasant to read. I don't take offense at the fact that what's on my screen is slightly removed from what's literally on disc, because today you get more benefits from having that separation.
Did you have a typo or was that intentional? You wrote "end up leaning towards spaces" for both. I'm not even sure which you meant to be tabs. I grew up post-GUI, but now use mostly the terminal. My preference is only spaces.
It was at one time a holy war. Spaces won. I used to be strongly pro-space so I was happy. However, with time and much reflection I've soften my stance considerably.
In any case, improvements with code editors have helped a lot to paper over the differences.
That's still language dependent, and mainly (IMO) one of Python's Windows-isms.
Speaking of Python, my ideal variant would:
# be whitespace insensitive (add back the braces and an official linter to use ANY kind of standard convention for enforcing a 'look')
# (Mostly un-do the external changes of Python 3 back to 2, BUT align to UTF8 rather than some 16 format)
# and would also handle all forms of 'strings' like C (though not necessarily null terminated, it'd be the array length + array style)
# with some added pre-tags that MAY be used to track if it's known to be in a given encoding.
# Validation/translation to such an encoding would be done only if requested and by a sub-library. Such encodings might include: Validated-UTF8-NFC, Validated-UTF8-NFKD, Mixed-UTF8, Tainted-UTF8... The Mixed variant would be the result of combining two UTF8 strings normalized to different standards, while the tainted one would be applied if the string is combined with, modified / returned from a function not known to be Unicode safe.
# File handles and other external I/O could also be opened without an encoding or explicitly with a binary encoding to allow raw binary access, and with an encoding to cause a final coercion to the desired encoding on output (and validation on input).
For me, I think it's from my underlying interest in being good at something without having to make compromises or handicaps. As a benign example, I rarely/almost never change the keybinds in any of the code editors that i've used because I like the idea of being able to competently use all of them in their default settings to have a consistent experience everywhere. This allows me to use another instance of VSCode/PyCharm/Eclipse/etc. that's not my own and be able to reasonably be productive in that instance. It's a little silly, but it's something that I like.
Tabs runs counter to that underlying interest to a very small degree. They're there to be customized, and there's an expectation that you are supposed to customize their appearance for each view that you use to view them if you want a consistent appearance.
To an extent, I view the debate between the two as something similar to the debate between configuration vs convention. Convention is great when you're working within the 99% of the use cases that it supports, but it becomes difficult for the folks who need to do something not supported by the built in conventions and vice versa. Some people like one, some people like the other as a matter of preference. However, there's a small subset of the population that basically need configuration for one reason or another to operate. Whether it's because you're building a product that needs a feature that the framework doesn't support to stay afloat, or in this case, they need to be able to customize the appearance of code on the screen easily to be able to perform their duties in a reasonable time. I don't know if this comparison makes sense or is reasonable.
I will say that i've ran into enough errors due to people entering tabs into places that they shouldn't that my hate for tabs has grown more than it should. This ranges from people somehow (via copy+paste or whatever) entering a tab into a form field that doesn't allow for it to other engineers doing something similar for code and causing weird issues.
I've never understood the dislike of tabs; when I was first presented with the concept of spaces-over-tabs I was new to the industry and went along with it, assuming there was some good reason. But I've never actually found one. Tabs are so much more semantic.
Here's one: when your code has no tabs, it's very obvious that whitespace is just a bunch of spaces. With tabs, it's harder to say, especially when mixed. It's one less thing to think about.
I'm 100% on board with not mixing them and making sure everyone on the team is on the same page. But that's a red herring; it can easily be remedied with linters/editor settings. The same is true for preventing tabs.
Eh, not really. A string with a tab is still hard to tell apart from a string with spaces. Linters don't help there (why would they?). And no way in hell am I going to change Vim to display them differently!
In my experience, tabs generally cause code that looks like:
if (c == ESC)
{
*r++ = '\\';
c = 'e';
}
else if (c == '\\' || c == '"')
*r++ = '\\';
*r++ = (unsigned char)c;
}
*r = '\0';
That's from the readline library version 7.0, bind.c, line number 727.
How does that happen? Because people end up mixing tabs and spaces. Some lines are indented with spaces, some with tabs, too many with tabs intermixed with spaces (I mean things like <space><tab><space>). I'm not even sure how people end up doing the last one, but it's common:
gdb 8.3 include/libiberty.h line 543 has 15 spaces, then a tab, then 10 spaces, then 2 tabs, then 3 spaces.
binutils 2.32 gas/itbl-parse.c line 119 has 1 tab, then 4 spaces, then 1 tab, then 4 spaces, then 1 tab, then 4 spaces, then 1 tab, then 4 spaces, then 1 tab, then 4 spaces, then 1 tab, then 4 spaces, then 1 tab, then 4 spaces.
binutils 2.32 zlib/make_vms.com line 831 has 6 spaces, then a tab, then 2 spaces, then 3 tabs, then 5 spaces.
I'm sure they added tabs to give the convenience of being able to adjust the indentation to what I like, but in reality they just force me to change it to what others like to even read a file. Using hard-tabs seems like naive idealism. I haven't yet seen a project that uses hard-tabs consistently. It's either consistent spaces or tabs intermixed with spaces. At least, that's been my experience.
As I mentioned in another comment, any modern editor will let you at least detect, if not automatically fix, mixed tabs/spaces. And there's nothing about deciding on spaces-only that prevents people from mixing.
From a quick look, the mentioned projects appear to be using a 2-space indent, but with 8 consecutive spaces being replaced by a tab character (with varying consistency - readline seems to do so always, the other examples less so).
> I'm sure they added tabs to give the convenience of being able to adjust the indentation to what I like
I don't think this is the case. It looks like the authors of those projects decided that a tab character always is 8 chars wide, and that one tab vs eight spaces thus only is a question of encoding the same thing. So they're quite far removed from the idea that each indent level should be a tab (which is what most "tab-proponents" argue for).
A tabbist would say the problem was that someone used spaces.
One of Dante's lesser hells is surely reserved for anyone that mixes tabs and spaces.
The issue really is that someone is not following guidelines (C, project, or implicit) and is not using tools that highlight such mistakes.
There is another level of hell reserved for those that use their own personal styles and conventions without paying attention to the existing code (or who just don't care).
> One of Dante's lesser hells is surely reserved for anyone that mixes tabs and spaces.
Mixing tabs and spaces for indentation is demonic, while mixing tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment is the only good choice without redefining what tabs are.
One can see this as just deciding on spaces as a path of least resistance, and then taking the time saved arguing or pondering the question to make money instead.
A thousand times this. I could come up with a whole bunch of arguments in favor of either side, but they all pale in significance compared to this.
What I really wish is that we had better ways to express indentation or alignment than just these two. Or to associate inline commentary with code other than by using either spaces or tabs to fake a two-column layout. Separating content from presentation, including affordances for the visually impaired, is practically a solved problem for other kinds of text. Why not adopt some of those same techniques for the text we work with every day?
In that thread the OP decides that the needs of a few outweigh the needs of the many. He went from trying to achieve "consistency across environments," which is very convenient and efficient to purposely making his workflow less efficient and more time consuming to suit the needs of two co-workers in an environment where his code will probably be read hundreds of times.
Develop how you want to develop and commit how your codebase is written. How is that hard? I guarantee whatever IDE you use has a feature to convert/change the indendation model of a file. Why is this even a topic?
You're not going to guilt me into using spaces because two people who read my code didn't like it. If you're using tab-width 8 I'm probably not going to like reading your code very much either. Does that mean you should change your entire workflow to suit me?
It's probably related to the editor choices one makes? As a tabs-only person, i am probably a little more autistic, a little less social (spaces are easier to share with others), a little less open to new technologies.
Tabs are great if you work by yourself. If you work with others, you need more complicated rules to be followed like "tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment."
So...
My theory is that coders using spaces have worked in more places and/or larger places, which tend to end up paying more.
I suspect it could be large, well-paying companies with prescriptive style guides skewing the results. eg, Google standardized on spaces for all their languages I've interacted with, maybe some others did too.
> Tabs are great if you work by yourself. If you work with others, you need more complicated rules to be followed like "tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment."
Except you don't, because you could just never align code, which completely eliminates the problem. I find that aligning code is way more trouble than it's worth.
It is. I wonder if it's an artifact of the other languages used at the organization, i.e. Go developers who use spaces are likely to be working on utilities or support code for a product that's primarily written in C or C++ (and probably been generating revenue for a while), while Go developers who use spaces are more likely to be working in green-field pure Go codebases that are newer with less of an established market.
161 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadTabs for line indentation, spaces for every other kind of alignment is one philosophy. It's the one that seems to hit the sweet spot for most of the issues that I care about (cross-editor consistent yet flexible management of line indentation depth as controlled by hits of the tab key + tabstop setting).
But if you're running the project and decide spaces are The One True Way™, I'll figure out a way to get the editor to do it for me and ask you for a raise for the trouble (and, of course, market standards). ;)
You don't have to "figure out" anything. It's the default of every IDE I've ever used.
I press tab, VSCode inserts 4 spaces. I press shift+tab, it deletes 4 spaces.
Nobody actually presses spacebar 4 times to indent unless they are forced to use vim on some remote machine.
Totally, hazard pay factor. ;)
..but I do it because of habits learned in python shell and also because of that cowboy character on the Simpsons cartoon that called himself OCD about the number 4 and then counted 1,2,3,4 tapping his foot and shooting his gun into the air.
Even then, you can just use >> and << in vim; as long as it's set up correctly it'll insert spaces.
Works with whole sections in visual mode too ("v, down, down, down, >" will indent four lines).
My PhD advisor does... His preferred editor is vi (not vim, but vi)
Which is probably not every IDE or editor.
> I press shift+tab, it deletes 4 spaces.
How entirely intuitive and not-awkward compared to hitting delete.
> they are forced to use vim on some remote machine.
Vim is not exactly unpopular as an editor of choice.
But overarching all that -- the ;) at the end of my comment should have been a clue that I was not sincerely arguing that figuring out how to use spaces for tabs is an involved task. Even somebody using vim (whether forced or by choice) should know `:set expandtab`. Most editors worth investing in will provide a convenient way of doing this.
Rarer are the editors that will also let you change indentation width on the fly while expanding tabs to spaces, though, which is generally easy if you use tab characters for indentation. I'm not super familiar with VSCode, but having just fired it up and tried it out, maybe it can do this if you turn on Detect Indentation, though it doesn't seem to be the default, and I haven't put it through the paces for less trivial cases.
Try it, you'll like it. Especially when you want to untab an entire block of code instead of just one line.
- Highlight entire block of code
- shift+tab unindents entire block (whereas delete would delete entire block)
Plus, once you know a lot of shortcuts, `shift` seems to be sort of a negating key so it actually starts to be intuitive. (i.e. in vim, if you are searching for a string, "n" will move to next match, "shift+n" will move to previous match)
> Vim is not exactly unpopular as an editor of choice.
I think by "some remote machine" he's implying "default configuration", because vim can be configured to insert spaces; I would know, I have mine set up that way.
:set expandtab
https://standardjs.com/
https://medium.com/@hoffa/400-000-github-repositories-1-bill...
So the number of people that prefer spaces far outweighs the tabbers.
Now, take the pool of people that use spaces and tabs and let them compete for a 100k job. 9 times out of 10 even if randomly hired it will be a space person.
Also, as a by the way, on the medium post. The reason Java has so much tabs is specifically due to the default Eclipse formatting that prefers a mix Tab/Space approach. Which is absolutely horrifying in my personal opinion. I don't have any numbers but Eclipse probably holds 80%, followed by Netbeans and/or IntelliJ. (both of which default to spaces)
But you'll get the same result when they compete for a job that pays poorly. If all other factors were equal, the distribution of developers who prefer tabs should match that of developers who prefer spaces.
By your argument, people named Steve would make less money, because they're outnumbered by people not named Steve.
So yes, people named Steve would make less money (though this argument might not work as well for people named Jeff, Warren or Bill I guess).
Edit - ahh, hencq has a reasonable explanation for that.
For one, women are more than men (slightly, around 51%, but more. And if not more, equal). So it's not true that "the small group tends to get less pay" in this case. Women are less only in some jobs (like IT). There are more women than men in others (e.g. in education it's over 60% women). But even in those jobs women might be paid less than men.
Second, women and minorities being paid less can be explained by many factors, from discrimination, to women (either naturally, or by nurture) not pursuing promotions/raises aggressively enough, to exploitation (e.g. since some minorities are in bad condition socially, or might be afraid of deportation etc, one can exploit that to pay them less, "take it or leave it"). These practices of course can not be the case with tabs/spaces.
Third, there are countries where the majority gets less pay. E.g. in South Africa the whites are paid more than blacks, same for other countries with a smaller more privileged citizenry and a wider base of rural/indigenous/colored/etc population.
Err, is the distribution is only affected by the number in each category (and not e.g. tab/space preference), then you'd be able to sample the same results for 30k jobs. 9 times out of ten it will be a space person there too.
Thus, if the 28,657 survey respondents are also randomly distributed, the ratio of poor vs good paid would be the same as real life, as would be the ratio of tabs vs spaces.
In other words, one wouldn't expect a skew in one category in favor of the other (if the choice wasn't a factor). Of course correlation != causation, but correlation can point to causation, or to a third, unknown factor that correlates with both attributes.
If a default install of an IDE (including vIM) will screw up your code.... you might consider rethinking your strategy. :-)
You should format it like this (regardless of whether you use tabs or spaces):
Tab proponents suggest alignment to be done with spaces, and indentation to be done with tabs.
Some systems say a tab is 8 spaces, others say it's 4. Some editors can set a tab to any customizable N spaces. But a space is always a space so your code will look like you intended (or should I say indented) it no matter who's looking at it.
Sure, IDE's are easy (though many people use multiple IDE's and/or editors across multiple machines).
I've also got a couple diff tools, a few VCS's, also the online parts of VCS like web-based pull request review UI's.
Tabs also tend not to play as nice with vertically aligned elements, if you prefer that for things like say the '.' on multi-line chained method calls, or longer function parameter lists.
I'll work without complaint or changing it with any existing code whether spaces or tabs. Mix the two for indentation however and fixing it is the first commit I make before touching anything else.
I will have trouble controlling my frustration if I ever have to work on a codebase built with 3 spaces per indentation.
https://editorconfig.org/
Also, max line width should be 120 characters. 80 is too limiting if you're using sensible variable names like you should.
I technically press the tab button but my edit inserts 4 spaces.
I doubt many space users actually type spaces by hand (a common pseudo-counterargument against spaces).
[0] https://black.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
Using tabs is stupid. Therefore, people who prefer using tabs tend to be stupider than people who prefer using spaces. Generally speaking, stupider people make less money than less stupider people.
Last month there was a reddit discussion that outlined some really compelling accessibility-related reasons to use tabs, worth a read: https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/c8drjo/nobody_t...
But I just hate using them.
Maybe it was the 8 space default of vim (nano?) when I was sysadmining. Maybe it was that there was inertia, and tabs are always the thing that's causing problems. But I just can't get over it. I just don't like tabs.
I think you're onto something. In old-school editors there wasn't an abstraction layer between the characters and the way they were displayed. You were moving bytes themselves, so a character byte that took up multiple columns but which you couldn't edit the middle of must have seemed gross and unnecessary.
In today's world there's more abstraction, so people are more comfortable with abstraction. I use a font that merges "=>" into a single two-column-wide arrow, because it's more pleasant to read. I don't take offense at the fact that what's on my screen is slightly removed from what's literally on disc, because today you get more benefits from having that separation.
In any case, improvements with code editors have helped a lot to paper over the differences.
Speaking of Python, my ideal variant would:
# be whitespace insensitive (add back the braces and an official linter to use ANY kind of standard convention for enforcing a 'look')
# (Mostly un-do the external changes of Python 3 back to 2, BUT align to UTF8 rather than some 16 format)
# and would also handle all forms of 'strings' like C (though not necessarily null terminated, it'd be the array length + array style)
# with some added pre-tags that MAY be used to track if it's known to be in a given encoding.
# Validation/translation to such an encoding would be done only if requested and by a sub-library. Such encodings might include: Validated-UTF8-NFC, Validated-UTF8-NFKD, Mixed-UTF8, Tainted-UTF8... The Mixed variant would be the result of combining two UTF8 strings normalized to different standards, while the tainted one would be applied if the string is combined with, modified / returned from a function not known to be Unicode safe.
# File handles and other external I/O could also be opened without an encoding or explicitly with a binary encoding to allow raw binary access, and with an encoding to cause a final coercion to the desired encoding on output (and validation on input).
# Ref: https://unicode.org/reports/tr15/#Norm_Forms
For me, I think it's from my underlying interest in being good at something without having to make compromises or handicaps. As a benign example, I rarely/almost never change the keybinds in any of the code editors that i've used because I like the idea of being able to competently use all of them in their default settings to have a consistent experience everywhere. This allows me to use another instance of VSCode/PyCharm/Eclipse/etc. that's not my own and be able to reasonably be productive in that instance. It's a little silly, but it's something that I like.
Tabs runs counter to that underlying interest to a very small degree. They're there to be customized, and there's an expectation that you are supposed to customize their appearance for each view that you use to view them if you want a consistent appearance.
To an extent, I view the debate between the two as something similar to the debate between configuration vs convention. Convention is great when you're working within the 99% of the use cases that it supports, but it becomes difficult for the folks who need to do something not supported by the built in conventions and vice versa. Some people like one, some people like the other as a matter of preference. However, there's a small subset of the population that basically need configuration for one reason or another to operate. Whether it's because you're building a product that needs a feature that the framework doesn't support to stay afloat, or in this case, they need to be able to customize the appearance of code on the screen easily to be able to perform their duties in a reasonable time. I don't know if this comparison makes sense or is reasonable.
I will say that i've ran into enough errors due to people entering tabs into places that they shouldn't that my hate for tabs has grown more than it should. This ranges from people somehow (via copy+paste or whatever) entering a tab into a form field that doesn't allow for it to other engineers doing something similar for code and causing weird issues.
Edit: formatting
My editor (VSCode) notifies me if I open a file that has any mixed tabs and spaces and offers to fix them all with one click.
> no way in hell am I going to change Vim to display them differently!
Sounds like we've found the problem.
How does that happen? Because people end up mixing tabs and spaces. Some lines are indented with spaces, some with tabs, too many with tabs intermixed with spaces (I mean things like <space><tab><space>). I'm not even sure how people end up doing the last one, but it's common:
gdb 8.3 include/libiberty.h line 543 has 15 spaces, then a tab, then 10 spaces, then 2 tabs, then 3 spaces.
binutils 2.32 gas/itbl-parse.c line 119 has 1 tab, then 4 spaces, then 1 tab, then 4 spaces, then 1 tab, then 4 spaces, then 1 tab, then 4 spaces, then 1 tab, then 4 spaces, then 1 tab, then 4 spaces, then 1 tab, then 4 spaces.
binutils 2.32 zlib/make_vms.com line 831 has 6 spaces, then a tab, then 2 spaces, then 3 tabs, then 5 spaces.
I'm sure they added tabs to give the convenience of being able to adjust the indentation to what I like, but in reality they just force me to change it to what others like to even read a file. Using hard-tabs seems like naive idealism. I haven't yet seen a project that uses hard-tabs consistently. It's either consistent spaces or tabs intermixed with spaces. At least, that's been my experience.
> I'm sure they added tabs to give the convenience of being able to adjust the indentation to what I like
I don't think this is the case. It looks like the authors of those projects decided that a tab character always is 8 chars wide, and that one tab vs eight spaces thus only is a question of encoding the same thing. So they're quite far removed from the idea that each indent level should be a tab (which is what most "tab-proponents" argue for).
A tabbist would say the problem was that someone used spaces.
One of Dante's lesser hells is surely reserved for anyone that mixes tabs and spaces.
The issue really is that someone is not following guidelines (C, project, or implicit) and is not using tools that highlight such mistakes.
There is another level of hell reserved for those that use their own personal styles and conventions without paying attention to the existing code (or who just don't care).
Mixing tabs and spaces for indentation is demonic, while mixing tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment is the only good choice without redefining what tabs are.
What I really wish is that we had better ways to express indentation or alignment than just these two. Or to associate inline commentary with code other than by using either spaces or tabs to fake a two-column layout. Separating content from presentation, including affordances for the visually impaired, is practically a solved problem for other kinds of text. Why not adopt some of those same techniques for the text we work with every day?
Develop how you want to develop and commit how your codebase is written. How is that hard? I guarantee whatever IDE you use has a feature to convert/change the indendation model of a file. Why is this even a topic?
You're not going to guilt me into using spaces because two people who read my code didn't like it. If you're using tab-width 8 I'm probably not going to like reading your code very much either. Does that mean you should change your entire workflow to suit me?
It's probably related to the editor choices one makes? As a tabs-only person, i am probably a little more autistic, a little less social (spaces are easier to share with others), a little less open to new technologies.
Tabs are great if you work by yourself. If you work with others, you need more complicated rules to be followed like "tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment."
So...
My theory is that coders using spaces have worked in more places and/or larger places, which tend to end up paying more.
Except you don't, because you could just never align code, which completely eliminates the problem. I find that aligning code is way more trouble than it's worth.