Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs • Hacker News Board

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

#611

Post by lhorie » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 9:33 PM UTC

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…

"whatever my editor sets it to" is what I would answer, precisely because I've heard the arguments for both sides to death, and I acknowledge that this holy war exists because both sides' arguments have merits. For me, I expect that my team as a group has a rationale for whatever choice is made in the interest of avoiding pointless bikeshedding, but I expect each individual to be adaptable enough that the choice doesn't actually negatively impact their productivity.

Strong opinions loosely held and all that.

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

#612

Post by jelder » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 9:35 PM UTC

tombert wrote: post #518

IshKebab wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, whitespace-sensitive languages are still generally the exception (except newlines). In fact I can't think of a new language that is vaguely popular and whitespace sensitive since Python. I guess there is YAML but that isn't a programming language and is also a bit mental.

Haskell is (slowly)growing in popularity, and F# is whitespace sensitive, and these are (for better or worse), the only languages I touch nowadays. I suppose that maybe none of the really popular languages follow this though...my bad.

Ok, here's a question I've been wanting to ask someone steeped in syntactic-whitespace languages. Do you find that two developers typing the same code will format it the same way? How much would an auto-formatter change in your team's code?

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

#613

Post by lloeki » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 9:38 PM UTC

pera wrote: post #509

news_to_me wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure there's a circle of hell specifically for those who mix spaces and tabs. That being said, this problem and problems like it can be solved simply by not aligning things visually: print( 'some long thing', further, arguments ) Strictly adhering to indentation and never alignment can make the code a bit less readable, but conforming to a canonical indentation like this also makes it easier to reindent, m…

> I'm pretty sure there's a circle of hell specifically for those who mix spaces and tabs. Could you please clarify why do you consider "tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment" such a bad practice? I have never read any argument against it. Alignment itself can be done automatically by any editor that supports smart tabs.

Simple: it's hell to automate.

My process is as follows:

    - tabs allow for custom settings
    - tabs need spaces to allow for alignment, because previous
    - automatically deciding what constitutes alignment vs
      indent is a non-trivial problem, highly dependent on the
      language†
    - using spaces throughout is worse theoretically because
      it flattens the theoretical problem but solves impedance
      mismatch
    - therefore I use spaces and am all the merrier in every practical
      use case
    - except for languages who make dash 3 easy (such as Go thanks
      to gofmt)
    - except for projects I have no say in, where I respect the will
      of the maintainers, because conventions among well-behaved
      people matter more than my highly individual opinion.

† to which the usual answer is "but your editor sucks with lang X", well too bad, I'd rather have pragmatic editor portability than have perfect language parsing in every editor being a pipe dream I hinge upon.

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

#614

Post by dmix » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 9:53 PM UTC

K0SM0S wrote: post #483

ronnier wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've grown so tired of sarcasm. Online and in real life people are often saying the exact opposite of what they mean. We have to pick up the sarcasam to truly understand.

The real issue with sarcasm is that it actually places the burden of subtleness on the speaker, whereas people will usually blame the listener for not understanding. If the tone and wording isn't just about perfect, then it's obviously easy to miss sarcasm, let alone the humorous intent. And that is sometimes very hard in writing, hence the "/s" which ruins the fun for everybody. Likewise if the listener isn't educat…

> HN clearly fits the former, though; sarcasm is just about yet another norm here!

Agreed, this is why I didn't want to take a hard position on downvoting someone for missing the sarcasm. We're in a public forum which crosses cultural boundaries. I see the argument for both sides.

Although I lean more towards downvoting as the majority of people on HN will get the joke and it's an opportunity to learn for those unfamiliar with the mainstream culture.

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

#615

Post by tracker1 » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 9:58 PM UTC

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…

I personally prefer tabs for the reason mentioned above... also, before JS minimizers, it meant less characters in the output. Now, I'll set my editor to whatever is the convention in the team, and/or the greater community (JS is 2 spaces, mostly, C#/VB 4, etc.).

As others have mentioned, having a required auto-linting step helps a lot. But it really depends on your specific needs.

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

#616

Post by ccalf » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 10:00 PM UTC

_yosefk wrote: post #582

jinglebells wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

"I don't believe it's my position to enforce the amount of whitespace another developer has to use in their editor." I suspect this might not be my most popular comment, but I honestly think that this is why tab users might actually make less than space users on average. On average, it's more productive to enforce things than leave everything configurable, thus different everywhere, thus harder to make sense of and d…

It's plausible and goes to show why the blog post choosing salary is itself a bad metric to begin with. It has skewed the entire discussion.

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

#617

Post by tracker1 » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 10:03 PM UTC

ramses0 wrote: post #574

mikejmoffitt wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This guy gets it. Tabs for indent, spaces for formatting within. No need to push your tab size standards on the next person to edit your code, and no need to force their editor to retab it to their preference, and back again when it's saved. "It's the editor's default", or worse, "I never really thought about it" are horrible reasons for doing anything, and hearing something else might be a sign of a pulse.

I also prefer tabs, but always make sure to write spaces to disk. The better you are with your editor, the less you have to worry about whether the original file was using spaces or tabs. Therefore, writing 100% spaces to disk is the best way to insulate yourself from possible issues of people who _don't_ know what they're doing with spaces, tabs, or their editor.

Plus, when most people are using an editor that doesn't have a per-project settings for the language/format to use, it's really hard. Getting everyone else on a VS solution to change their JS editor to 2 spaces, and disable the auto-format is an exercise in frustration.

That said, the convention for most languages seems to be towards spaces at this point, and I don't care enough to argue anymore as my choice of editor(s) allows me to set it per project at least.

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

#618

Post by xaedes » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 10:03 PM UTC

quotemstr wrote: post #398

lhorie wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While your comment is obviously meant as a joke, it somehow rings true from my anecdotal experience. I'd also like to see an analysis of space-vs-tabs as it relates to operating systems. Again, from anecdotal experience, it seems spaces are more common for folks with *nix background who tend to work in product-oriented companies (i.e. where code is an asset) and tabs are more common with windows folks, who tend to wo…

Windows itself is indented with spaces.

Because the code of Windows is the asset ;)

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

#619

Post by tracker1 » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 10:07 PM UTC

rdiddly wrote: post #559

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…

Yep if you're going to convert from tabs to spaces or vice versa, please do a check-in/commit consisting only of that change before making any substantive code changes.

Was going to say the same... nothing wrong with a commit including only format changes... for that matter, add it as a task to the project, commit, run it, commit, then proceed to edit. If you have commit hooks setup, add it as a precommit hook/task.

As long as it's relatively transparent for everyone to be able to use.

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

#620

Post by xaedes » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 10:11 PM UTC

blktiger wrote: post #371

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…

You mean something like this don't you? [tab]void some nice method(int param a, [tab] int param b So long as you only use tabs for indentation, not alignment, tabs look correct on _everyone's_ machine. The real problem with tabs is that (some) people are lazy and do stuff like this: [tab]void some nice method(int param a, [tab][tab][tab][space][space]int param b Personally, I think if you work like that you need to l…

No I think grand parent comment means that some developers sometimes add spaces instead of tabs, even if it is by mistake. That will mix everything up.

"Could" happen the other way too, but I think: If you use spaces you typically dont repeatedly hit space to produce a single indent. You use tab which gets translated to spaces. Once the editor is set up for this, you don't accidently insert tabs for indentation.