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The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious

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Re: The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious

#51

Post by whoomp12342 »

mjburgess wrote: post #2

The point of the "tab" option is that there is no consensus on the number of spaces to use -- so by using tab, one uses a single character, and allows the developer to determine screen spacing to their comfort. "Tab" being a live option is a symptom of the war-never-over in absolute spacing degree -- since different people have different eye-sight, eye-strain, etc. constraints, different linguistic familiarities, cod…

And what say you about reaching a consensus on the number of tabs to use?!?!?!

Re: The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious

#52

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

jedberg wrote: post #23
phplovesong wrote: post #3

Tabs are better, simply because you can view them as you like. Go obviously does this, and Haxe too (with default formatting options, even tho its configurable)

Spaces are better, simply because you don't have to worry if another developer is seeing the code different than you. See, I can do it too. This is why there is an ongoing discussion. Because there is no clear cut answer, just opinions. At least this article brings some data to the discussion.

> another developer is seeing the code different than you.

but that's the whole damn point ... I like substantively indented code, you prefer minimally indented, we should both be happy (and we can be, by using tabs).

Re: The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious

#53

Post by Izkata »

thih9 wrote: post #46
throwawayqqq11 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Indentation != spacing. And thats all the argument i need. I dont understand why people argue with consistent text layout for all-spaces. You can use tabs to indent and spaces to align after that, in most cases.

> You can use tabs to indent and spaces to align after that, in most cases. In practice this is difficult; since the characters are invisible by default, people will inevitably mix up the two. Looks like the industry standard is to give up and use spaces everywhere, unless strict and mandatory tooling exists.

And that was (one of the reasons) why spaces won: alignment always worked.

But the new problem is linters and formatters don't understand alignment, so they always want those extra spaces removed, making a mess.

Re: The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious

#54

Post by quietbritishjim »

mjburgess wrote: post #2

The point of the "tab" option is that there is no consensus on the number of spaces to use -- so by using tab, one uses a single character, and allows the developer to determine screen spacing to their comfort. "Tab" being a live option is a symptom of the war-never-over in absolute spacing degree -- since different people have different eye-sight, eye-strain, etc. constraints, different linguistic familiarities, cod…

> so by using tab, one ... allows the developer to determine screen spacing to their comfort

(Allow me to reply to this age-old argument with the age-old counter argument...)

But you also have to decide at what point to hard wrap each line based on a max line length, and you can only do that based on some choice of tab size. Anyone with a different tab size preference would see the right column wandering depending on indentation level. This invalidates the only advantage of tabs (assuming file size is no longer a concern).

A common retort is that each reader's auto format (or soft wrapping) can sort out the wrapping. But if each coder is going to reformat the code anyway then they get the benefit of choosing their own indentation level regardless of tabs vs spaces.

Re: The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious

#55

Post by camel-cdr »

Arelius wrote: post #17
gte525u wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This works until someone tries to vertically align something like a table or a line that is wrapped.

Yes, this. Which the counter point is either, Don't align things, or use tabs for indentation, and spaces for alignment. And maybe you can enforce no alignment, but that's a hard fight to win. And as far as tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment, I've found no practical way to enforce this via tooling/linting. And a rule without enforcement becomes inconsistent, which is how we get files full of mixtures of sp…

Disallowing /[^\t]\t/ and /^ / is a good start.

Re: The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious

#56

Post by DanHulton »

mjburgess wrote: post #2

The point of the "tab" option is that there is no consensus on the number of spaces to use -- so by using tab, one uses a single character, and allows the developer to determine screen spacing to their comfort. "Tab" being a live option is a symptom of the war-never-over in absolute spacing degree -- since different people have different eye-sight, eye-strain, etc. constraints, different linguistic familiarities, cod…

I used to defend tabs for this reason, except I kept running into source code formatters/displays online that would attempt to display my code with the tabstop set to 8 spaces, which made it nigh-unreadable.

While I run into fewer that do this nowadays, it still reminds me that with tabs, What I Write May Not Be What You See, which can lead to readability issues, which I feel is a solid enough point against tabs that I've switched.

I write code so it is easy to read, and spaces are better for that than tabs, so now I use tabs. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious

#57

Post by Izkata »

GeorgeTirebiter wrote: post #30

Completely agree: tabs FTW. I wish I could find the reference, but when dealing with mono-spaced fonts, readability is apparently enhanced with THREE spaces per indent. Now, good computer people hate non powers-of-two, so it's either 1, 2, 4, or 8 spaces!!!! I guess I'm not a good computer person, because my eyes find tab stops at '3 spaces per tab' just right.

I remember suggesting it as a jokey promise over a decade ago, but got curious and tried it myself. It also seems just right to me, and is what I've used in all my personal projects ever since.

Re: The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious

#58

Post by tsss »

jihadjihad wrote: post #4

Rob Pike on why Go is indented with tabs [0]: > How wide should the indentation be? 2 spaces? 4? 8? Something else? > By making the indent be a tab, you get to decide the answer to that question and everyone will see code indented as wide (or not) as they prefer. > In short, this is what the tab character is for. 0: https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/iHGLTFalb54/m/zqMo...

[flagged]

Re: The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious

#59

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

bbkane wrote: post #29

The most important thing is consistency. I've become a huge fan of deferring tabs vs. spaces debates to an autoformatter. Set it; forget it; argue about something else. This is most useful when applied ecosystem wide - no one in the Go ecosystem argues about tabs vs spaces, they just run `go fmt` (or more likely their editor is set to do that automatically) and move the #$@% on with life :) Fortunately for me, newer…

An autoformatter wont touch a tabbed ASCII diagram in the comments,

Re: The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious

#60

Post by ar_lan »

DanHulton wrote: post #56
mjburgess wrote: post #2

The point of the "tab" option is that there is no consensus on the number of spaces to use -- so by using tab, one uses a single character, and allows the developer to determine screen spacing to their comfort. "Tab" being a live option is a symptom of the war-never-over in absolute spacing degree -- since different people have different eye-sight, eye-strain, etc. constraints, different linguistic familiarities, cod…

I used to defend tabs for this reason, except I kept running into source code formatters/displays online that would attempt to display my code with the tabstop set to 8 spaces, which made it nigh-unreadable. While I run into fewer that do this nowadays, it still reminds me that with tabs, What I Write May Not Be What You See, which can lead to readability issues, which I feel is a solid enough point against tabs that…

> I write code so it is easy to read, and spaces are better for that than tabs, so now I use tabs. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This is a very confusing final sentence. :)

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