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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

#651

Post by mcv »

jdc0589 wrote: post #339
mcv wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My answer would be: why are you asking me? Shouldn't I be asking you? Do you have coding standards here? Or is it going to be my job to decide on the coding standards?

and you would have missed the point of the question entirely. Regardless, thats a pretty unnecessarily aggressive response to an interview question; or maybe I'm just reading it that way.

Or you would be missing the point of the answer.

It's not meant to be aggressive, but to make a point. It's important that everybody uses the same coding style, regardless of personal preference. Spaces are fine, tabs are fine, but mixing them would be absolutely terrible. A programmer's personal preference for one or the other is irrelevant. What matters is that he's willing to adapt to the coding style of the company.

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

#653

Post by laythea »

sumeno wrote: post #489
jdc0589 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does spending time considering the implications of spaces vs tabs really indicate competence? No, it signifies that you have spent enough time programming in a wide variety of platforms and with enough other peers to run in to the issue and understand that it exists.

It just signifies that someone has worked with enough pedantic developers that they had to form an opinion on something as insignificant as this, or that this person is pedantic enough to have a strong opinion on it. I wouldn't consider the first to be a good indicator of someone's skill as a developer, and the second would be a good indicator that it was someone I didn't want to work with, but I'm guessing that's no…

I agree. This is ridiculous.

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

#654

Post by problems »

patrickdavey wrote: post #601
jar3624 wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

completely agree with you. and i religiously autoformat my code before i read the code and just before i save the file. However it still amazes me how the majority of developers i work with either have no opinion on the topic or worse think this is a bad idea. some the reasons I've heard was it makes alot of changes to a file causing alot of diffs with previous version making it harder to figure was was actually chan…

Doesn't that mean you make tools like git blame a whole lot less useful? I'm all for formatting my own code correctly, but I'm not going to nuke git history for a few spaces.

Blame is for me at least a fairly infrequently used operation and there's really not much else it breaks unless there are other active branches at the time. I don't find blame information that valuable and would argue that most uses are in fact counterproductive (it's in the name - blame).

You'd only have to do it once, all changes past that point would be good assuming you set it up in your IDE automatically or in your precommit. So if for some reason you needed to go back a long ways and blame something you could always check out back past that initial styling fix and see it.

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

#655

Post by iamNumber4 »

Not the be the voice of reason in a sea of crazy; but this is just stupid. correlation != causation - making an assumption on pay rate vs who uses tabs and who uses spaces makes my brain hurt thinking about what moron approved this article.

Set the tab stop to what ever your project/team style guides requires. Tabs to spaces is just plain stupid. Why on earth would you ignore the x09 character, a single character that exists for this exact reason, and replace it with multiple x20 in the file. Just set your tab stop to what you like to look at, be it 2, 4, or 42 characters. By the way the default is 4 characters for most editors/IDE's.

vim - :set tabstop=4 vscode - to your settings add the following. "editor.tabSize": 4

Everyone else's comments are moot!

Debate over.

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

#658

Post by tripzilch »

sqeaky wrote: post #443
hinkley wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will don't understand why it's called Poe's Law if he said it in 2005. This phenomenon was well documented on Usenet by the early nineties.

If we called everything that was first described on Usenet as "Usenet's Law" then everything would be Usenet's law, probably even a couple of things in physics.

Also known as Usenet's Law [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14561801

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

#659

Post by thebigspacefuck »

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…

What about "whatever you're using"? It probably doesn't seem well thought out, but is there any other answer? Personally I don't care. I use spaces in Python because of pep8 and tabs in PHP or JS depending on whether or not the file is using tabs or spaces already. Sometimes I realize I checked in a file to git with tabs instead of spaces so I go back and run a find and replace to match indentation. Is that so wrong? Shitty question IMO

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

#660

Post by Can_Not »

lmm wrote: post #446
jdc0589 wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

an indicator is just that, an indicator. It doesn't mean anything on its own, but in the presence of additional information (interview question responses and discussions in this case) it can help paint a better picture. If someone answered this question with "what? I don't know/care", and then knocked more important questions out of the park, then it was obviously a bad indicator and isn't relevant.

I don't follow. Either their answer means something or it doesn't.

Some answers will mean something and other answers will mean nothing.
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