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Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs

stackoverflow.blog

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Re: Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs

#291

Post by _jal »

freehunter wrote: post #213
TekMol wrote: post #42

This does not mean that changing from tabs to spaces will increase ones income. I would expect there simply is a confounding factor that the author did not look at. Maybe the info is not in the data. I can imagine that the space/tab choice is related to the "upbringing" of the developer. Maybe which language or editor they used first in their life. Or maybe it's related to culture. For example when using IRC, tabs ar…

Tab is usually three spaces, right? So if I hit the tab key, I'm getting three button presses for the price of one. So extrapolating from that, if I hit tab I can get my work done three times faster and get out of the office quicker. If I'm using space, it takes me three times longer, which makes the boss think I'm working three times harder and I get a pay raise. I'm always at the office before she is (to fill in al…

A quality analysis, but you're neglecting the wear on your space key. Managers tend to look askance at wasting capex, so I'd recommend taking that in to account.

Re: Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs

#292

Post by IanCal »

jinglebells wrote: post #201
redm wrote: post #123

The reason I use tabs is pretty simple. It's faster to move around only using the keyboard. It's also faster if I'm changing code that requires reformatting. Finally, when another developer looks at the code, their IDE will render the tabs as whatever its set up for, 2 spaces, 4 spaces, etc. In other words, it adds flexibility. Brace yourself: I use two spaces after the end of sentences too. [1] I am quite the rebel.…

> Finally, when another developer looks at the code, their IDE will render the tabs as whatever its set up for, 2 spaces, 4 spaces, etc. In other words, it adds flexibility. This is exactly why I use tabs and the reason which appears to never get cited in the holy wars. People who use spaces want to line up their '=' signs, that's fine, but I don't believe it's my position to enforce the amount of whitespace another…

First, my golden rule is "do whatever the other devs using the repo do" but

> People who use spaces want to line up their '=' signs, that's fine

To me this feels like it's a good use of spaces as well as tabs. Tabs for indentation, to get your nesting right. Spaces to align things. That way setting your tabs to X spaces works just fine and everything remains nicely aligned.

Though I'm not sure how common this is, so I just use spaces.

Re: Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs

#297

Post by atmosx »

jdc0589 wrote: post #221
austenallred wrote: post #94

Almost certainly a result of the spaces cabal and the (often unspoken of) prejudice against tab users. Don't think you make hiring decisions based on tabs vs spaces? Well you're part of the problem, then. I'm building an app to help you easily email your congressperson and ask them to create legislation requiring space/tab equality. This has to stop. Please consider donating to my Patreon.

> Don't think you make hiring decisions based on tabs vs spaces? I actually ask candidates "spaces or tabs?" in every single interview. I don't really care what the response is in regard to the holy war, and it doesn't mean anything on its own, but having SOME thought out response can be a GREAT indicator of how well versed someone is in general. e.g. I'm going to think way more highly of someone that says "tabs, bec…

If I were the candidate I will be giving mean looks while tapping the space bar as fast as possible!

Spaces FtW!

Ps. On a more serious note, the editor (actually the vim plugin) takes care of this.. default is 2 spaces for ruby and 4 for python (PEP8). I like ruby more, the identation too.

Re: Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs

#300

Post by yAnonymous »

nottorp wrote: post #61

Pretty simple: you use spaces because you're aware that there is more than one IDE/editor in this world and who knows what your code will get opened with tomorrow. This means you consider consequences beyond "but it works on my machine" so you're a better programmer. Ergo, higher salary.

That's exactly my experience, too. Developers who use default settings and tools are less interested in computers. Knowing the details of a system makes a developer infinitely more valuable.
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