21–30 of 129 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is interesting. Why do we use spaces anyway? I mean, really - what are the advantages spaces have over tabs? (I use spaces only because I try to follow common coding styles, like PEP 8, but I never gave it enough thought)
Tab width can vary between editors, i.e. do a "set shiftwidth=8" in vim, and it'll be 8 spaces. Spaces are more constant.r
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is interesting. Why do we use spaces anyway? I mean, really - what are the advantages spaces have over tabs? (I use spaces only because I try to follow common coding styles, like PEP 8, but I never gave it enough thought)
Tab width can vary between editors, i.e. do a "set shiftwidth=8" in vim, and it'll be 8 spaces. Spaces are more constant.r
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought that was the most unrealistic thing this season: a supposedly genius programmer who loves tabs and hates spaces.
Poe's law and all, I hope your comment isn't serious. The whole point was to highlight Richard's "neurotic" side. (It failed to convey it for me when his girlfriend started audibly indenting by hitting the spacebar 8 times... I'd go nuts, who wouldn't?) Also, plenty of geniuses use tabs :) the Linux kernel included. It obviously has no relation. (Seriously though, tabs are a matter of accessibility. https://leclan.ch…
I'm going to use this as fodder next time I get into an argument with someone about why spaces are better than tabs when writing code. Or maybe I've just been watching too much silicon valley...
I thought that was the most unrealistic thing this season: a supposedly genius programmer who loves tabs and hates spaces.
I've never met a programmer that didn't have some view of code style. Even the really clever ones consider their code to be a form of art, so what you use to write it does matter. It's all pretentious, but I actually thought it was a very accurate portrayal of the trivial things that programmers make a big deal out of.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Poe's law and all, I hope your comment isn't serious. The whole point was to highlight Richard's "neurotic" side. (It failed to convey it for me when his girlfriend started audibly indenting by hitting the spacebar 8 times... I'd go nuts, who wouldn't?) Also, plenty of geniuses use tabs :) the Linux kernel included. It obviously has no relation. (Seriously though, tabs are a matter of accessibility. https://leclan.ch…
This is interesting. Why do we use spaces anyway? I mean, really - what are the advantages spaces have over tabs? (I use spaces only because I try to follow common coding styles, like PEP 8, but I never gave it enough thought)
With tabs you need to configure each and every tool you use to use the right indent (2? 4? 8?), with spaces, every tool just works, and copy/pasting a section of code to or from an issue or an e-mail or a chat tool just works.
It is a matter of code typography. When more than one developer is working on a code base, it helps if every one sees the same outline, because with varying amounts of indenting one persons preference aligns all parameters in a long important method call, whilst any other indenting breaks (part of) that format — code may look fine for one person, but jumbled for another with a different indent preference.
With editor support better than ever, using spaces isn't something you think about when coding; you just hit tab to indent and it inserts the number of spaces configured.
I like Python's PEP 8 in that respect. The language itself (and the syntax checking tools such as pyflakes) simply states the sensible default you aught to be using.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Poe's law and all, I hope your comment isn't serious. The whole point was to highlight Richard's "neurotic" side. (It failed to convey it for me when his girlfriend started audibly indenting by hitting the spacebar 8 times... I'd go nuts, who wouldn't?) Also, plenty of geniuses use tabs :) the Linux kernel included. It obviously has no relation. (Seriously though, tabs are a matter of accessibility. https://leclan.ch…
I've never quite understood why lots of IDEs don't convert a file to your preferred variation of tabs or spaces when you open a file, and then convert it back again when you save it. On disk the indentation could be one thing while in the editor it's something else. That way everyone's happy.
You can easily and losslessly do it the other way around, though, which leads me to do exactly what you say when working on a space-indented project: I code with tabs, I convert before committing. It's usually easier than dealing with spaces.
I'm going to use this as fodder next time I get into an argument with someone about why spaces are better than tabs when writing code. Or maybe I've just been watching too much silicon valley...
I'm going to use this as fodder next time I get into an argument with someone about why spaces are better than tabs when writing code. Or maybe I've just been watching too much silicon valley...
the only reason to use spaces over tabs is if your tab key broke and you can't map it to a double-tap space (yeah, I did that once). /thread
How do you do that?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is interesting. Why do we use spaces anyway? I mean, really - what are the advantages spaces have over tabs? (I use spaces only because I try to follow common coding styles, like PEP 8, but I never gave it enough thought)
The common argument is that with spaces the indent is the same in not only every editor, but also every tool used, such as cvs, diff, patch, build tools, web viewers (e.g., for your cvs tool, issue tracker, and/or code review), shell tools (e.g., less and cat), et etcetera. With tabs you need to configure each and every tool you use to use the right indent (2? 4? 8?), with spaces, every tool just works, and copy/past…
You mean like those times I would have to configure my editor so it inserts the exact amount of spaces required by the project I'm working on, for the project maintainers prefer 4-width to 2-width or 8-width? :)
You talk about typography but this is exactly what I underline in my article: Your preference is not everybody else's and I personally find 2-space code absolutely unreadable... while some companies adopt it as their internal codestyle.
My eyesight has been deteriorating for the past 10 years and I've had to increase my font and zoom sizes as well as line spacing every now and then. Compact 2-space code truly is a strain on the eye for me. If you're using tabs, you don't have to care about my eyesight, just like you don't care about my font size.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is interesting. Why do we use spaces anyway? I mean, really - what are the advantages spaces have over tabs? (I use spaces only because I try to follow common coding styles, like PEP 8, but I never gave it enough thought)
One of the main drivers for spaces is alignment, which you should never attempt to do with tabs (except in contexts which normalize tabstops, which generally excludes programming). Aligning within a line can and should be done with spaces. There's good reasons against alignment in such cases -- for example, it creates git blame/git diff noise when reformatting due to having to update alignment on a bunch of other lin…
But I'm with you: that kind of column alignment is harmful to maintainability, and I find it much less readable too.
Some time ago I posted a few examples of column alignment gone bad, from the Servo source code:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9469713
and also discussed alignment here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9469713
Once you give up column alignment, there's no longer any real reason to prefer spaces, and you can gain the benefits of using tabs. As a side benefit, when you give up alignment, your code becomes just as readable in a proportional font as a monospaced font.
More details in my previous comments linked above, so I won't rehash them here. :-)