Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

stackoverflow.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 690 posts

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

#251

Post by problems »

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…

Yeah, it can start some interesting conversations too - I don't care personally and tend to go with whatever autoformat in the editor uses. My view is that formatting code shouldn't be a human's job, adding linebreaks on long lines, spacing things out to exactly line up, etc is just a waste of my time.

That's the computer's job - it should do it based on human readability rules though, clang-format is probably the best example of these rules applied, it uses a TeX-style formatting engine for code.

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

#252

Post by zensavona »

beaconstudios wrote: post #182
lliamander wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really prejudice if those 'tabbies' are just inferior, is it?

I can't believe that in 2017 I'm reading comments containing blatant spacial prejudice on Hacker News of all places.

Hacker News should be a Safe Space.

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

#253

Post by creepydata »

drblast wrote: post #244
creepydata wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously? When you start on a project you configure your IDE to match the project's conventions. If you are in a mentoring role you instruct your jr developers to do the same, first thing, before writing any code. This has never been an issue at any place I ever worked. If a PM can't get their developers to do something as simple as that then you have larger organization problems than code formatted weirdly. As well…

On a very large codebase, developed over decades, not months or years, by thousands of individual teams, using multiple versions of multiple IDE's, some of which didn't exist when the project started, across different languages, also some of which didn't exist when the project started, this is not so simple. Unless the project's settings are to use spaces.

I've worked on projects that have been developed over decades and there has never been an issue. We have conventions, developers are expected to follow conventions, and if they don't they are instructed go back and fix their code.

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

#254

Post by bluejekyll »

susw wrote: post #116
BoorishBears wrote: post #57

Earlier 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)

Nah, they all give you tabs once you set them up correctly .

I set tab to call auto-indent or the language formatter on the code. I literally hit tab once to insert whatever is the defined standard for the file. So my single tab key press inserts or removes exactly the right amount of white space.

It's a holdover from my emacs days; the one thing I could not give up from emacs...

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

#256

Post by lmm »

scrollaway wrote: post #198
lmm wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any coding standard that relies on humans to do something right is going to fail. Tabs might work if there was a way to automatically enforce no alignment and no use of spaces. But I've never seen any organization actually do that.

> But I've never seen any organization actually do that. You haven't looked very far! Most open source projects these days enforce code style through some forms of tooling. But saying that "Any coding standard that relies on humans to do something right is going to fail" is basically giving up and saying "do whatever". I mean, why even ask people to indent consistently if it's doomed to fail? It's a mixed indent part…

> You haven't looked very far! Most open source projects these days enforce code style through some forms of tooling.

Sure, but I've never seen a tool that was able to enforce that no-one was doing alignment.

> But saying that "Any coding standard that relies on humans to do something right is going to fail" is basically giving up and saying "do whatever".

Coding standards that you can implement in your enforcement tool are fine. But any rule you can't automate is not worth bothering with, IMO.

> I mean, why even ask people to indent consistently if it's doomed to fail? It's a mixed indent party for everybody!

Use a language that enforces indentation, or use a tool to autoindent. Trying to get people to indent consistently by hand is a waste of time.

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

#257

Post by lliamander »

clarkmoody wrote: post #196
beaconstudios wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't believe that in 2017 I'm reading comments containing blatant spacial prejudice on Hacker News of all places.

Espousing notions of whitespace power. Get that trash out of here.

More like get those tabby cats out of here.

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

#258

Post by data_hope »

sudhirj wrote: post #60
mjburgess wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, eg. many languages have spaces conventions formalized and those languages may pay more to develop in.

This is already accounted for in the article, the data seems to indicate this even in the same language, and consistently does so across all languages.

The effect in the data (unless it isn't random fluctuation. At the moment I'd go with the assumtion that it is a genuine correlation, as the effect is present over all subgroups), might (1) not be monocausal, i.e. a combination of contributing factors like development experience, age of IDEs/tooling, etc. might play a role as well as other aspects. (2) a cause might not be "explained away" because the control variable was considered. Let me elaborate

The years of experience variable might be taken to explain away the effect of experience, and then conclude that tabs vs. spaces must be due to another effect than years of experience. But chances are, that "years of experience" and "tabs vs. spaces" are just correlated to a common, causal property (like "programming proficiency" or however you want to call it). Both "years of experience" and "tabs vs. spaces" are then just incomplete reflections of the underlying cause, both rendering the effect of the underlying cause incompletely.

What I am trying to say is: Its complicated, probably you won't be able to find the one true cause for the effect in the data. If this were physics, one could come up with a predictive theory to put this to the test. In social studies, we just cannot control the parameters well enough.

If you are interested in reading more on this, "Causality" by Judea Pearl is a good (but exhausting read).

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

#259

Post by derekp7 »

dmix wrote: post #100
okreallywtf wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems unfair to downvote you just for misunderstanding, that was sarcasm friend.

It's pretty much an unwritten rule that a sarcastic joke on the internet with sufficient exposure will get a response by someone who didn't get it. Using /s really kills the fun (and whole point) of using sarcasm so it's a trade off to accept these comments will happen. I'm impartial to downvoting as to reply literally doesn't usually add to the conversation, which is generally the point of downvoting. Losing karma s…

Could also be that the reply is also an attempt to play the into the joke (kind of like a vaudeville straight man).

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

#260

Post by justin_vanw »

GavinAnderegg wrote: post #238
leblancfg wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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".

Well assuming correlation implies causation (always safe), enjoy being poor.
Post reply on HN