We are suffering from space exhaustion. Experienced older programmers known earning more were able to gobble up spaces way back while they were still cheap and are now enjoying spreading them around. Younger coders on a budget have to be stingy with spaces and are forced to use the poor tab substitute. This leaves the less experience professionals at the mercy of tab expansion by greybeard hackers. Sad.
Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs
231–240 of 690 posts
Re: Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs
#232Golang uses tabs for indentation and Go developer jobs have good salaries but then again this might be an outlier.
they controlled for language too, and didn't cite Go as an outlier
Re: Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs
#233Well, of course. Only companies with fuck-you money can afford the extra bytes spaces take up versus tabs, so it follows logically that they'd pay their developers more.
Warning, the parent post is sarcastic and should be chuckled at.
Re: Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs
#234Well, of course. Only companies with fuck-you money can afford the extra bytes spaces take up versus tabs, so it follows logically that they'd pay their developers more.
Palapa money
Re: Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs
#235A simple explanation that occours to me:
Many of those who answered tabs are actually using an IDE which inserts spaces when they push tab. They believe they are using tabs, because they've never realized that this is going on. People under that misapprehrension are likely to be less skilled.
Additionally, if a coder, is in fact, deliberately choosing the use tabs, they are going against the majority opion of coders and almost all style guides. That attitude might be correlated with lesser income.
Re: Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Tabs for indentation; spaces for alignment; If you try this, it fails for people who use a different tab size than you, which is the whole supposed point of using tabs. But yes, the correct answer is don't align. Utter waste of time.
> If you try this, it fails If it fails, then you have not understood and you are not using your tools correctly. If your alignment depends on tab width, then you are not using tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment, you are using tabs for indentation and alignment and spaces for alignment, which of course breaks when you change your tab width.
Ah, I see what you mean. I've never seen an editor work this way, normally they just swap spaces with tabs, leaving however many spaces can't be swapped. Which is probably why I've never seen tabbed code in the real world that doesn't look like utter garbage.
Re: Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs
#237What's going on with the salary disparity between US ($100k) and UK ($50k)?
I know nobody wants to hear this, but developers in the U.S. are overpaid compared to their peers in the rest of the world. We should count our blessings.
In UK best developers work as contractors and make on par with US peers. This is not accounted for in most data as they look at permanent job salaries in UK which are very low.
Re: Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs
#238I see a few arguments here which suggest people think tab-users might care less about their code and/or their fellow coder. As someone who slightly prefers tabs and abhors mixing of tabs/spaces, I find this frustrating. I generally prefer tabs because I feel that they're more egalitarian: I like 4-space indentation, but don't want to force that on everyone encountering my code. Similarly, I find 2-space indentation v…
"As someone who slightly prefers tabs" ... "I generally prefer tabs" wat
I generally prefer tabs, but I don't use them when writing Python (which is most of my job these days). I'm also not all that hung up about it, so I started with "slightly".
Re: Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you hit Tab in Notepad and hit save you get a file with tabs. If you hit Tab in IntelliJ or a related IDE you get a file with spaces. If you hit Tab in an older version of VS (the kind you'd expect in certain types of settings where high pay is not usually expected) you get tabs, but in newer versions you get spaces (with defaults)
Unless the project you're working on has an Editorconfig file and your IDE supports it (VS and IntelliJ do by default). In this case it is supposed to override your IDE settings.
But that just contributes to the gap, the kind of place that devotes time to things like shared editor configs is the kind of place with enough money (and interest) to contribute to development quality, and places like that probably pay more.
The average "sweatshop/devshop" developer probably doesn't even know/care about tabs vs spaces.
Re: Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you explain that? I can't see how different tab settings would mess up formatting. Unless you use tabs to match the position of things over two different lines (which is abusing tabs), or mix spaces and tabs, tabs should work fine.
It is usually frowned upon when people's excuse is "You are holding it wrong".
?