7 ms·

Whenever this old debate comes up, I am reminded of this quote “There's a good part of Computer Science that's like magic. Unfortunately there's a bad part of

by j_m_b 9y ago

Whenever this old debate comes up, I am reminded of this quote “There's a good part of Computer Science that's like magic. Unfortunately there's a bad part of Computer Science that's like religion.” - Hal Abelson I don't worry about indentation because emacs does it for me. However, if this is your personal pet peeve then you should provide all of your developers / contributors with a plugin, script or other utility that formats their code to your standards. This issue has long been solved programmatically and it is a waste of mindspace to deal with it any other way.

leggomylibro 9y ago
That quote reminds me of one of Joseph Campbell's - "computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy." And to go along with that, some things like GNU Make still requires tabs, which is definitely annoying when you have your editor set to autoconvert. And some sects like Go or Python don't technically REQUIRE one or the other, but still try to aggressively purge the heretics.
- na85 9y ago
  Is that a limitation in GNU Make or is it an inherited limitation of m4? In my experience, m4 is an arcane bit of software that surprisingly few people know about and one that frankly should have been replaced years ago. Personally, I try to never use autoconf because of this.
  - dasyatidprime 9y ago
    Tab as the prefix for command lines is a property of all Makefile formats I'm aware of (though not of many other build script formats). Make itself (including GNU Make) does not generally use M4, though both Autoconf and Automake use it, often in conjunction with Make, as part of the Autotools suite which is also published by GNU. So, none of the above, in itself. It is a historical anomaly which has been preserved.
  - khedoros1 9y ago
    I haven't dug into it, but Wikipedia claims that Make is actually about a year older than M4 (obviously not GNU Make).
- linkregister 9y ago
  go fmt Controversy solved for one language ;)
  - rjeli 9y ago
    And clang-format[0] for C/C++, google-java-format[1] for Java, YAPF[2] for Python, rustfmt[3] for Rust... [0]: https://clang.llvm.org/docs/ClangFormat.html https://clang.llvm.org/docs/ClangFormat.html [1]: https://github.com/google/google-java-format https://github.com/google/google-java-format [2]: https://github.com/google/yapf https://github.com/google/yapf [3]: https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/rustfmt https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/rustfmt
    - mjevans 9y ago
      The parent post's point wasn't about add-on formats. The point was that the language spec it's /self/ has an included lint tool to eliminate controversy. The go language has /a/ (single) correct formatting syntax.
- eternauta3k 9y ago
  TIL vim has been hiding this problem from me.
  - knome 9y ago
    emacs' makefile-gmake-mode, loaded automatically for makefiles, also hides this. I've set indent-tabs-mode to nil in my .emacs for years, but the mode knows it's needed, and will indent the line with a highlighted tab ( until you begin writing in the command to follow it, when it unhighlights it ).
- Sean1708 9y ago
  > which is definitely annoying when you have your editor set to autoconvert Is this actually a problem? Every editor I've ever used has detected that I'm writing a makefile and has changed the indentation to tabs automatically.
TekMol 9y ago
This issue has long been solved programmatically and it is a waste of mindspace to deal with it any other way. I beg to differ. Aligning code is an art form. And different people like different styles. Your "whatever" approach is one. And there are many others.
- mmrezaie 9y ago
  Art or whatever it is subjective to decide which code formatting is better. As long as a single "code format actor" can transform different styles automatically then why one should care. I think most communities are having an agreement on which one they would like to choose and most of the times they chose the best style but doesn't mean one has to limit themselves into those formats anyway. Something like git push --code-style somestyle would be a relaxing.
- aequitas 9y ago
  Like programming itself aligning code is not an art form, at least not in where productivity and consistency is required, it's just a means to an end. In my opinion the art is in documenting your code and explaining what your code does (what you intend it to do not how it does it).
- Spivak 9y ago
  Sure, and writing the rules to feed to your linter and formatter is where the art takes place now.
- KGIII 9y ago
  I don't really care if you use tabs or spaces. Just please, for the sake of humanity, don't mix them.
  - mwfunk 9y ago
    Seriously, this is the heart of it. The one thing about Emacs that I just can't forgive is its insistence over the decades on mixing tabs and spaces in its auto-indentation. Ultimately, the spaces vs. tabs debate really comes down to which policy is less likely to result in mixed tabs/spaces. If people use tabs, it seems inevitable that some spaces will sneak in there as well. If people use spaces, tabs are unlikely to sneak in. Obviously that's a combination of common default editor configs and human behavior, but that's just how it works out in practice.
iak8god 9y ago
This tabs vs spaces thing is a recurring joke and source of conflict on HBO's Silicon Valley, and I always thought having a raging debate over tabs and spaces was one of the less realistic things about the show. But what I'm hearing now is that my use of emacs has just left me out of touch with the really tedious stuff other people sometimes have to deal with.
- adambyrtek 9y ago
  Any proper IDE/editor has auto-indentation nowadays, so there's really nothing special about Emacs anymore. Obviously even with auto-indentation you still have to agree on the right convention for a given project. As with most code style debates, it usually doesn't matter that much one way or another as long as you make a call and keep it consistent across the project.
  - dgfgfdagasdfgfa 9y ago
    Ehh, I'd say emacs has a minor edge in that tab is a command to indent to the correct level, not to insert characters. I.e., you can also use a single `tab` on an over-indented line to correct indentation. Your point stands, of course.
    - terminalcommand 9y ago
      Most emacs users would use ctrl-i instead of tabs or spaces I imagine, at least I do it like that. It is much easier to type. Emacs still has a quirk that stands out :)
      - marcus_holmes 9y ago
        Only an Emacs veteran would say that ctrl-i is easier to type than Tab ;)
    - abritinthebay 9y ago
      > I'd say emacs has a minor edge in that tab is a command to indent to the correct level, not to insert characters. I've had this in basic code editors for... 10 years or so? It's hardly an emacs thing.
Sivart13 9y ago
> I don't worry about indentation because emacs does it for me. The problem is, everyone's editor "does it for" them, but everyone wants to use a different editor. And there are interoperability issues when one person's editor produces tabs and another produces spaces. It's a relatively minor tower of babel situation.
- khedoros1 9y ago
  Well...the team tends to learn pretty quickly which editors don't follow the project's coding standards by default, and comes up with configuration files for those editors. If that doesn't happen, then inconsistent indentation probably isn't the first thing that needs to be addressed.
pyre 9y ago
> However, if this is your personal pet peeve then you should provide all of your developers / contributors with a plugin, script or other utility that formats their code to your standards. http://editorconfig.org/ http://editorconfig.org/
- pm215 9y ago
  Interesting idea and it would certainly help to alleviate the "how many editors do we need to provide code style config for" problem, but it looks rather limited in scope at the moment (for instance it doesn't even try to address "brace on current line or line of its own", let alone more odd things like GNU coding style brace indent).
  - apetresc 9y ago
    It's only really targeting text-editor-level settings, things like encoding, EOLs, and "what characters does the tab key emit". It doesn't attempt to solve every formatting/linting/style issue, that would make the editor plugins really hard to keep compatible.
- chongli 9y ago
  You don't even have to do that. Just use whatever format is in the main repository. Then use git smudge and clean filters[0] to convert to your preferred format whenever git checks out the files. This way your editor does not need to care about the format everybody else uses. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/2318063 https://stackoverflow.com/a/2318063
mercer 9y ago
For js (at least?) we now have Prettier [1]. It's already a must-have editor plugin for myself and any underlings. It's real nice. [1]: https://github.com/prettier/prettier https://github.com/prettier/prettier
- tonyhb 9y ago
  Which itself is based off of gofmt and facebook's Reason. More languages should provide standardized ways of writing and formatting code. It makes everything easier - from diffing to subjectivity.
  - Sean1708 9y ago
    > Which itself is based off of gofmt In what way? It looks like a fairly standard formatter to me.
    - mercer 9y ago
      At least for javascript the 'standard' formatters are significantly dumber than Prettier.

by j_m_b 9y ago

leggomylibro 9y ago

That quote reminds me of one of Joseph Campbell's - "computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy." And to go along with that, some things like GNU Make still requires tabs, which is definitely annoying when you have your editor set to autoconvert. And some sects like Go or Python don't technically REQUIRE one or the other, but still try to aggressively purge the heretics.

na85 9y ago
Is that a limitation in GNU Make or is it an inherited limitation of m4? In my experience, m4 is an arcane bit of software that surprisingly few people know about and one that frankly should have been replaced years ago. Personally, I try to never use autoconf because of this.
- dasyatidprime 9y ago
  Tab as the prefix for command lines is a property of all Makefile formats I'm aware of (though not of many other build script formats). Make itself (including GNU Make) does not generally use M4, though both Autoconf and Automake use it, often in conjunction with Make, as part of the Autotools suite which is also published by GNU. So, none of the above, in itself. It is a historical anomaly which has been preserved.
- khedoros1 9y ago
  I haven't dug into it, but Wikipedia claims that Make is actually about a year older than M4 (obviously not GNU Make).
linkregister 9y ago
go fmt Controversy solved for one language ;)
- rjeli 9y ago
  And clang-format[0] for C/C++, google-java-format[1] for Java, YAPF[2] for Python, rustfmt[3] for Rust... [0]: https://clang.llvm.org/docs/ClangFormat.html https://clang.llvm.org/docs/ClangFormat.html [1]: https://github.com/google/google-java-format https://github.com/google/google-java-format [2]: https://github.com/google/yapf https://github.com/google/yapf [3]: https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/rustfmt https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/rustfmt
  - mjevans 9y ago
    The parent post's point wasn't about add-on formats. The point was that the language spec it's /self/ has an included lint tool to eliminate controversy. The go language has /a/ (single) correct formatting syntax.
eternauta3k 9y ago
TIL vim has been hiding this problem from me.
- knome 9y ago
  emacs' makefile-gmake-mode, loaded automatically for makefiles, also hides this. I've set indent-tabs-mode to nil in my .emacs for years, but the mode knows it's needed, and will indent the line with a highlighted tab ( until you begin writing in the command to follow it, when it unhighlights it ).
Sean1708 9y ago
> which is definitely annoying when you have your editor set to autoconvert Is this actually a problem? Every editor I've ever used has detected that I'm writing a makefile and has changed the indentation to tabs automatically.

TekMol 9y ago

This issue has long been solved programmatically and it is a waste of mindspace to deal with it any other way. I beg to differ. Aligning code is an art form. And different people like different styles. Your "whatever" approach is one. And there are many others.

mmrezaie 9y ago
Art or whatever it is subjective to decide which code formatting is better. As long as a single "code format actor" can transform different styles automatically then why one should care. I think most communities are having an agreement on which one they would like to choose and most of the times they chose the best style but doesn't mean one has to limit themselves into those formats anyway. Something like git push --code-style somestyle would be a relaxing.
aequitas 9y ago
Like programming itself aligning code is not an art form, at least not in where productivity and consistency is required, it's just a means to an end. In my opinion the art is in documenting your code and explaining what your code does (what you intend it to do not how it does it).
Spivak 9y ago
Sure, and writing the rules to feed to your linter and formatter is where the art takes place now.
KGIII 9y ago
I don't really care if you use tabs or spaces. Just please, for the sake of humanity, don't mix them.
- mwfunk 9y ago
  Seriously, this is the heart of it. The one thing about Emacs that I just can't forgive is its insistence over the decades on mixing tabs and spaces in its auto-indentation. Ultimately, the spaces vs. tabs debate really comes down to which policy is less likely to result in mixed tabs/spaces. If people use tabs, it seems inevitable that some spaces will sneak in there as well. If people use spaces, tabs are unlikely to sneak in. Obviously that's a combination of common default editor configs and human behavior, but that's just how it works out in practice.

iak8god 9y ago

This tabs vs spaces thing is a recurring joke and source of conflict on HBO's Silicon Valley, and I always thought having a raging debate over tabs and spaces was one of the less realistic things about the show. But what I'm hearing now is that my use of emacs has just left me out of touch with the really tedious stuff other people sometimes have to deal with.

adambyrtek 9y ago
Any proper IDE/editor has auto-indentation nowadays, so there's really nothing special about Emacs anymore. Obviously even with auto-indentation you still have to agree on the right convention for a given project. As with most code style debates, it usually doesn't matter that much one way or another as long as you make a call and keep it consistent across the project.
- dgfgfdagasdfgfa 9y ago
  Ehh, I'd say emacs has a minor edge in that tab is a command to indent to the correct level, not to insert characters. I.e., you can also use a single `tab` on an over-indented line to correct indentation. Your point stands, of course.
  - terminalcommand 9y ago
    Most emacs users would use ctrl-i instead of tabs or spaces I imagine, at least I do it like that. It is much easier to type. Emacs still has a quirk that stands out :)
    - marcus_holmes 9y ago
      Only an Emacs veteran would say that ctrl-i is easier to type than Tab ;)
  - abritinthebay 9y ago
    > I'd say emacs has a minor edge in that tab is a command to indent to the correct level, not to insert characters. I've had this in basic code editors for... 10 years or so? It's hardly an emacs thing.

Sivart13 9y ago

> I don't worry about indentation because emacs does it for me. The problem is, everyone's editor "does it for" them, but everyone wants to use a different editor. And there are interoperability issues when one person's editor produces tabs and another produces spaces. It's a relatively minor tower of babel situation.

khedoros1 9y ago
Well...the team tends to learn pretty quickly which editors don't follow the project's coding standards by default, and comes up with configuration files for those editors. If that doesn't happen, then inconsistent indentation probably isn't the first thing that needs to be addressed.

pyre 9y ago

> However, if this is your personal pet peeve then you should provide all of your developers / contributors with a plugin, script or other utility that formats their code to your standards. http://editorconfig.org/ http://editorconfig.org/

pm215 9y ago
Interesting idea and it would certainly help to alleviate the "how many editors do we need to provide code style config for" problem, but it looks rather limited in scope at the moment (for instance it doesn't even try to address "brace on current line or line of its own", let alone more odd things like GNU coding style brace indent).
- apetresc 9y ago
  It's only really targeting text-editor-level settings, things like encoding, EOLs, and "what characters does the tab key emit". It doesn't attempt to solve every formatting/linting/style issue, that would make the editor plugins really hard to keep compatible.
chongli 9y ago
You don't even have to do that. Just use whatever format is in the main repository. Then use git smudge and clean filters[0] to convert to your preferred format whenever git checks out the files. This way your editor does not need to care about the format everybody else uses. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/2318063 https://stackoverflow.com/a/2318063

mercer 9y ago

For js (at least?) we now have Prettier [1]. It's already a must-have editor plugin for myself and any underlings. It's real nice. [1]: https://github.com/prettier/prettier https://github.com/prettier/prettier

tonyhb 9y ago
Which itself is based off of gofmt and facebook's Reason. More languages should provide standardized ways of writing and formatting code. It makes everything easier - from diffing to subjectivity.
- Sean1708 9y ago
  > Which itself is based off of gofmt In what way? It looks like a fairly standard formatter to me.
  - mercer 9y ago
    At least for javascript the 'standard' formatters are significantly dumber than Prettier.