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

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

#591

Post by jasonkostempski »

pera wrote: post #545
jasonkostempski wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only reason 2, 4 or 8 is less "readable" to anyone is because they have a mental breakdown when they see a style they don't prefer and can't get past it. Tab is a variable width character, it has no place in text laid out with fixed-width fonts.

Is having a style preference bad? One can freely configure color scheme and font, so why should indentation be restricted?

Those options are unambiguous and never require changes to a plain text file to work. I'm pretty sure it was Ayn Rand who said "A is A, but God only knows what Tab is." It's not always used for indentation, it might be for alignment, even if it's at the beginning of a line. There's no way to make any sane programmatic decisions base on it's presence. It does not belong in the digital world!

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

#592

Post by saagarjha »

CydeWeys wrote: post #245
piker wrote: post #56

Could it be that a few large, well-compensating employers are shifting the result? (E.g., https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html#Spaces_vs.... )

Could well be. I know that Google for sure requires spaces, and some cursory Googling leads me to the believe that Facebook does as well. Does anyone have information on Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, etc.? Of course, if all of the top companies are requiring spaces, then there's probably a reason for that, and its impact on salary data is thus meaningful, not just a spurious correlation.

Don't work there, but I know that Apple tends to use spaces for their public-facing code–I'd expect that their internal code does too.

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

#595

Post by saghm »

frobozz wrote: post #360
inanutshellus wrote: post #306

= Why Grown-Ups Don't Use Tabs = * Joe likes 4-space tabs, I like 2-space tabs, and Jane is old-school with 8-space tabs. * All goes well until someone aligns something visually, like so: void someNiceMethod( [tab][tab][tab][tab][space][space]int myParam...); * Now it aligns perfectly on my machine, looks mostly ok on Joe's machine, and is ON MARS on Jane's machine. Thus one-or-more of three futures happens: * Someon…

Who aligns like that? It seems to defeat the purpose of putting it on a separate line. void someNiceMethod( int myParam... ); Hey Presto! You, Joe and Jane all get your preferred size size of tab. As a bonus, this indentation style works equally well if Jim uses a non-fixedwidth typeface.

Do people actually code with non-monospaced fonts? I've never seen anyone doing that before

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

#596

Post by moomin »

ionised wrote: post #107
moomin wrote: post #64

Remind me what Facebook and Google use :)

I don't know the anwer to that, but why would it matter?

Because they pay well, employ a large number of people and could potentially be the confounding factor.

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

#597

Post by sbov »

dghf wrote: post #358
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.…

> The reason I use tabs is pretty simple. It's faster to move around only using the keyboard. Well, yes, if you use the arrow keys (unmodded) and nothing else. But who does that? Even Notepad lets you jump from word to word with CTRL-left/CTRL-right. Sublime Text must have something similar, surely?

Beyond that, this tends to work across all input fields in your OS. If you're missing this you're missing out on being more efficient in any typing based activity.

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

#598

Post by infogulch »

dankohn1 wrote: post #573
jdc0589 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

My answer would be that any modern software development shop should be using a linter like Rubocop, eslint or gofmt that runs automatically on every commit. It doesn't actually matter what standard a group chooses, but there is real cognitive overhead to trying to understand inconsistently formatted code. And, people shouldn't be the ones criticizing incorrectly formatted code; a GitHub robot should be.

Exactly. The impact of any decision has much more significance socially that the sum of all of the individual significance.

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

#599

Post by tzury »

Software developer must come to a flexible mindset in order to succeed.

Use whatever's right for you! And, if you come to a workplace where there are "rules" about that, try to obey them.

Never take part in any of those wars of Tabs vs Spaces, VIM vs Emacs vs Sublime vs whatever.

Spend time on writing more tests instead!

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

#600

Post by sedachv »

pyre wrote: post #343
rlpb wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when another developer looks at the code, their IDE will render the tabs as whatever its set up for, 2 spaces, 4 spaces, etc. This is an argument I hear often from tab proponents. What it misses out is the downside: my IDE has a certain arrangement on my screen, and I'll either have to invoke horizontal scrolling or I'll have a bunch of wasted space if you are using different size tabs from me. This is far from fle…

> Further, the only sensible screen width is 80 characters, since that also works everywhere. I'm curious. Where does 80 characters not work now? How many people / industries are still using green-screen terminals with a fixed-width of 80 characters? I'm generally in favour of enforcing line-wrapping requirements, because I've worked with people that would have a tendency to write code that trails off the end of the…

80 character line wrapping is IMO more important on larger and wider-aspect ratio screens. Even the smallest 16:9 aspect ratio screen can be split into two columns, one being an 80 character column for code and the other left wide for a web browser or document viewer (this is now my setup when working on 16:9 aspect ratio laptops).

I see a lot of people work on large displays and with multi-monitor setups. Those who do not have their screens split into an 80-character or similar terminal and text editor width columns spend a lot of time switching between screens or applications. Couple this with the fact that you have to move your eyes around a lot on larger displays (and even head, in the case of multi-monitor set ups) and their setups actually make them navigate slower than they would on a smaller display.

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