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"Many of us" - you are using that way too often in your posts and it's a pseudo argument. Fact is, you're giving up the choice of different coding styles to mak

"Many of us" - you are using that way too often in your posts and it's a pseudo argument. Fact is, you're giving up the choice of different coding styles to make something broken work. "Many of us" prefer spaces for that reason and that's why it has become the de facto standard.

Stratoscope 10y ago
Your point about my overuse of "many of us" is a good one, so I changed it to "I" in the comment you just replied to. Fair enough? But look, my real point here is that column alignment is detrimental in several ways, and indentation is a better way to illustrate your code structure - both for statements and expressions. Using indentation instead of column alignment isn't a workaround for anything - it's just a more practical, readable, maintainable way to format your code. This question really has nothing to do with tabs or spaces.
- yAnonymous 10y ago
  I see the points for VCS and non-monospace fonts, minor as they may be, but readability is absolutely a matter of choice. While we're on the matter of user prefereces and numbers: Most style guides recommend spaces as lined out in my other post. >Google, Microsoft, Apache and NASA for C-family languages, Crockford and almost every other web-related style guide I've ever seen recommend the use of spaces. Apple is a notable exception. That doesn't make them right, but I'd like to know how you came up with the "many of us" in the first place, because there are far more developers who use spaces (https://ukupat.github.io/tabs-or-spaces/ https://ukupat.github.io/tabs-or-spaces/), and it's not even close.
  - scrollaway 10y ago
    "Many of us" doesn't imply "a majority of us". This statement isn't contradictory and is backed up by the data you linked: "Many of us use tabs. Many of us use spaces. Some of us use form-feed.. bloody nutters!"
scrollaway 10y ago
> "Many of us" prefer spaces for that reason and that's why it has become the de facto standard Has it? I wasn't informed. I know it has in the Python community, because of pep8 mainly, but a lot of communities have settled on tabs (Lua for example, and for a long time PHP until recently). I'll paste here what I replied to someone off-thread, regarding "why" anything ever becomes a de facto standard. > I would bet quite a bit that personal indent preferences are driven by whatever the default is on the editor of choice of the person in question. I would equally bet that you can correlate the tab defaults on editors/IDEs widely used in specific communities (Visual Studio for Windows C-family stacks, PyCharm for python, Eclipse and its little family for java, etc) and the general preference of that community. Chicken and egg problem. Spaces aren't standard because they're preferred; they're preferred because they're standardized by editor defaults. Developers that don't have a particular preference grow into those defaults.
- yAnonymous 10y ago
  It's more like new editors ship with spaces as default, because most style guides recommend it. Google, Microsoft, Apache and NASA for C-family languages, Crockford and almost every other web-related style guide I've ever seen recommend the use of spaces. Apple is a notable exception. It seems you're the vocal minority: https://ukupat.github.io/tabs-or-spaces/ https://ukupat.github.io/tabs-or-spaces/

Stratoscope 10y ago

Your point about my overuse of "many of us" is a good one, so I changed it to "I" in the comment you just replied to. Fair enough? But look, my real point here is that column alignment is detrimental in several ways, and indentation is a better way to illustrate your code structure - both for statements and expressions. Using indentation instead of column alignment isn't a workaround for anything - it's just a more practical, readable, maintainable way to format your code. This question really has nothing to do with tabs or spaces.

yAnonymous 10y ago
I see the points for VCS and non-monospace fonts, minor as they may be, but readability is absolutely a matter of choice. While we're on the matter of user prefereces and numbers: Most style guides recommend spaces as lined out in my other post. >Google, Microsoft, Apache and NASA for C-family languages, Crockford and almost every other web-related style guide I've ever seen recommend the use of spaces. Apple is a notable exception. That doesn't make them right, but I'd like to know how you came up with the "many of us" in the first place, because there are far more developers who use spaces (https://ukupat.github.io/tabs-or-spaces/ https://ukupat.github.io/tabs-or-spaces/), and it's not even close.
- scrollaway 10y ago
  "Many of us" doesn't imply "a majority of us". This statement isn't contradictory and is backed up by the data you linked: "Many of us use tabs. Many of us use spaces. Some of us use form-feed.. bloody nutters!"

scrollaway 10y ago

> "Many of us" prefer spaces for that reason and that's why it has become the de facto standard Has it? I wasn't informed. I know it has in the Python community, because of pep8 mainly, but a lot of communities have settled on tabs (Lua for example, and for a long time PHP until recently). I'll paste here what I replied to someone off-thread, regarding "why" anything ever becomes a de facto standard. > I would bet quite a bit that personal indent preferences are driven by whatever the default is on the editor of choice of the person in question. I would equally bet that you can correlate the tab defaults on editors/IDEs widely used in specific communities (Visual Studio for Windows C-family stacks, PyCharm for python, Eclipse and its little family for java, etc) and the general preference of that community. Chicken and egg problem. Spaces aren't standard because they're preferred; they're preferred because they're standardized by editor defaults. Developers that don't have a particular preference grow into those defaults.

yAnonymous 10y ago
It's more like new editors ship with spaces as default, because most style guides recommend it. Google, Microsoft, Apache and NASA for C-family languages, Crockford and almost every other web-related style guide I've ever seen recommend the use of spaces. Apple is a notable exception. It seems you're the vocal minority: https://ukupat.github.io/tabs-or-spaces/ https://ukupat.github.io/tabs-or-spaces/