Ask HN: Tabs or Spaces? |
Ask HN: Tabs or Spaces? |
The counter to this is people using spaces for alignment, Like if one wants to list arguements below the openning backet of a function call, and line up the closing bracket.
The counter counter is: stop that. Adopt a style guide that doesn't do alignment and sticks to a simple rule like "Always indent once while within a multiline expression" Alignment is for art. We don't have time for your subjective view of what makes code pretty.
Programming is art—to some of us!
Computers don't care about the alignment or the code looking pretty on screen, but code looking pretty on screen helps the human writers and readers alike.
I am sure you don't use syntax highlighting either, and that you only use short one-letter variable names.
Though I have also seen consistently applied non-subjective alignment based styles, that are also perfectly reably. But no more reasable than a consistently applied indenting only style. Alignment styles are in general more complex to describe and thus more inconsistently applied.
And sure some subjective alignment based styles are pretty are maybe even marginally more readable. But does it scale? Can the intern who is only here for summer weeks be expected to learn what makes it look nice in the teams opinion while also learning everything else? How about that one coworker who just doesn't agree and refuses to conform to these subjective rules that can't even be written down. Sure, you can have art if you want for your solo project. But programming is a team sport.
Yes, but tabs are defined in terms of presentation. Therein lies the confusion.
If you are working on a team, do what the team does.
If you are working alone, do whatever works best for you.
But more practically, I think the right thing to do is use an opinionated formatter (like Go's gofmt or similar) and enforce that across the teams that you work with. Life's too short to bicker about tabs vs spaces, when there are more important things to discuss like short variables vs long variables ;)
And I know tabs are seeing a comeback lately, but they are basically the only ASCII character that does not have a predefined width.
And the reason I dislike that is because they don't have clear semantics even in the pure text-only world: eg. writing out a table in ASCII is not possible with these "tabulating" characters, because if the column data is wider than (tab-width – 1), well, there goes your alignment. And when something is so badly defined not to serve the purpose it's named after, I can't like it. :)
If it was called the "indent" character which was ignored anywhere but at the start of the line, it would at least be sane and consistent.
Incidentally, Emacs can do the right thing in most modes by turning tab key into the (re)indent command.
Everyone likes to take a dump on mixing tabs/spaces. But it solves all problems with both. Everyone can view the indentation width they prefer; 2, 3, 4, 8, whatever. And alignment is always correct no matter what width you prefer. An auto format tool can remove the need to manually deal with anything.
Indent width is a visual effect that should not be mandated. You wouldn't mandate a color scheme for your code base, so why would you mandate indentation width?
> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
Or that people using tabs-only are in general more consistent in the other parts of code styling?
I _don't_ have any data to support either, but I strongly suspect it's completely unrelated to one another.
But I still disagree with your take on whether a team activity to achieve something of practical value can be or can contain art (and I am not thinking only about the presentation/appearance of code).