4 ms·

If they used tabs instead of spaces, it wouldn't be an issue. People could format code on their machine whatever number of columns they prefer. But no... Spa

If they used tabs instead of spaces, it wouldn't be an issue. People could format code on their machine whatever number of columns they prefer. But no... Spaces. Jesus. If you're looking at someone's HTML and it's got this kind of thing strewn about...        ...you know with certainty that you're dealing with either 1) an amateur, or 2) someone constrained by top-down corporate numbnuttery.

ender7 13y ago
The debate over spaces vs. tabs is as old as time. Associating one side of the argument with "top-down corporate numbnuttery" betrays a lack of familiarity with the issue. The fact is that whatever shop you work at should have an opinion one way or the other, and you should follow it. Programmers will endlessly bikeshed the issue regardless of which style is chosen.
- lostcolony 13y ago
  Happily, the Tab-letariat can agree with the Space-eoisie that a separation of the whitespace classes is necessary and good, and any commingling of the two is an affront to God.
  - frou_dh 13y ago
    Hell, God is an amateur? He should know that tabs indent and spaces align. There's nothing to be confused about.
fournm 13y ago
We do, in fact, use tabs at work. But I wanted to attempt to avoid starting this war yet again.
- hackinthebochs 13y ago
  Radical idea: lets move code away from the anachronism of flat files. There have been incredible evolution in some areas of development, and other areas time has completely frozen. We should have modern tools from the top-down. dons flame retardant suit
  - aragot 13y ago
    Explanation? You could put code elsewhere than in flat files? Elsewhere that is neither VBA nor PLSQL ;)? I'm interested. Otoh, if you're going to suggest binary structures, I wont be able to approve you if they're not easy to manage in Git.
    - hackinthebochs 13y ago
      Roughly it would be some sort of structured text, markup that represents the structure of the code rather than having a flat text file which then requires parsing to reconstruct structure. There are a couple of motivations here: structured representation allows editors to much more freely handle custom visual representations. Debates about tabs, spaces, braces, semicolons, parenthesis, etc etc are painfully outdated. These simply become properties of your chosen visual representation. It also allows more meaningful transforms without requiring a compilation pass, as a meaningful intermediate language is already present. This would have a few benefits: semantic text highlighting, straightforward semantic changeset merging, enhanced error highlighting and more semantic error detection (if I insert a line of code somewhere, the error is readily marked as the inserted line as the surrounding code is still semantically valid), sharing the semantic representation between IDE plugins. I'm sure this is just scratching the surface. I'm reminded of the project I recall reading about from steve yeggie regarding a language agnostic IDE framework (whatever happened to that anyways?). A language agnostic, semantically rich file format would allow entire classes of transforms to apply across all languages that could be marked up by the language agnostic file format. There are so many possibilities here, and yet a non-trivial amount of programmers are still anchored by the supposed benefits of editing code from the console! Programmers should be the first to be looking forward rather than being tied down to the past.
      - aragot 13y ago
        I thought you were going to suggest something crazy and imaginative issued from Big Data, like introduce some concept of Big Code, where you'd map-reduce your execution path, have non-consistent executions spread over thousands of servers, with the explicit target of singularity ;) The option you suggest could have been done since long and it hasn't: I'm inclined to wonder why. Probably text-file editing has reached the good-enough level where we've got enough tooling to cope with the drawbacks, and the basics of open source is, it has to be the most urgent solution for the one who takes the initiative.
jcampbell1 13y ago
  is one of those smells except for when it isn't. <th>First Name</th> The above is useful html, but I have had experienced developers "fix" it, thinking it was some copy-paste/dreamweaver accident. Non-Breaking SPaces are useful at times.

ender7 13y ago

The debate over spaces vs. tabs is as old as time. Associating one side of the argument with "top-down corporate numbnuttery" betrays a lack of familiarity with the issue. The fact is that whatever shop you work at should have an opinion one way or the other, and you should follow it. Programmers will endlessly bikeshed the issue regardless of which style is chosen.

lostcolony 13y ago
Happily, the Tab-letariat can agree with the Space-eoisie that a separation of the whitespace classes is necessary and good, and any commingling of the two is an affront to God.
- frou_dh 13y ago
  Hell, God is an amateur? He should know that tabs indent and spaces align. There's nothing to be confused about.

fournm 13y ago

We do, in fact, use tabs at work. But I wanted to attempt to avoid starting this war yet again.

hackinthebochs 13y ago
Radical idea: lets move code away from the anachronism of flat files. There have been incredible evolution in some areas of development, and other areas time has completely frozen. We should have modern tools from the top-down. dons flame retardant suit
- aragot 13y ago
  Explanation? You could put code elsewhere than in flat files? Elsewhere that is neither VBA nor PLSQL ;)? I'm interested. Otoh, if you're going to suggest binary structures, I wont be able to approve you if they're not easy to manage in Git.
  - hackinthebochs 13y ago
    Roughly it would be some sort of structured text, markup that represents the structure of the code rather than having a flat text file which then requires parsing to reconstruct structure. There are a couple of motivations here: structured representation allows editors to much more freely handle custom visual representations. Debates about tabs, spaces, braces, semicolons, parenthesis, etc etc are painfully outdated. These simply become properties of your chosen visual representation. It also allows more meaningful transforms without requiring a compilation pass, as a meaningful intermediate language is already present. This would have a few benefits: semantic text highlighting, straightforward semantic changeset merging, enhanced error highlighting and more semantic error detection (if I insert a line of code somewhere, the error is readily marked as the inserted line as the surrounding code is still semantically valid), sharing the semantic representation between IDE plugins. I'm sure this is just scratching the surface. I'm reminded of the project I recall reading about from steve yeggie regarding a language agnostic IDE framework (whatever happened to that anyways?). A language agnostic, semantically rich file format would allow entire classes of transforms to apply across all languages that could be marked up by the language agnostic file format. There are so many possibilities here, and yet a non-trivial amount of programmers are still anchored by the supposed benefits of editing code from the console! Programmers should be the first to be looking forward rather than being tied down to the past.
    - aragot 13y ago
      I thought you were going to suggest something crazy and imaginative issued from Big Data, like introduce some concept of Big Code, where you'd map-reduce your execution path, have non-consistent executions spread over thousands of servers, with the explicit target of singularity ;) The option you suggest could have been done since long and it hasn't: I'm inclined to wonder why. Probably text-file editing has reached the good-enough level where we've got enough tooling to cope with the drawbacks, and the basics of open source is, it has to be the most urgent solution for the one who takes the initiative.

jcampbell1 13y ago

  is one of those smells except for when it isn't. <th>First Name</th> The above is useful html, but I have had experienced developers "fix" it, thinking it was some copy-paste/dreamweaver accident. Non-Breaking SPaces are useful at times.