I use tabs because I prefer 4-space indents and others might prefer 2-space indentation or the gross and unacceptable 6-space indentation.
If more than one person is working on a code base, there will likely be more than one preference, and with tabs everyone gets to just set their own tab width.
Generally aligning stuff isn’t nice. But if you do, it’s tabs up to whatever level of indentation you’re at then spaces the rest of the way. So you wouldn’t have to assume a tab size. And the tabs and spaces have different semantic meaning (indent vs alignment) so mixing them makes sense. It's even built into Jetbrains IDEs, where it's called "Smart Tabs".
Although really just adding a level of indent is better than aligning.
This is a legit observation. However, I would argue that spaces needs a set indentation width anyway, so if tabs had a set indentation width that coders are expected to maintain when aligning code, it wouldn't make a difference. Enforcing that in practice may be different, but in theory it works.
It's OK, I replace all the tabs with spaces for uniformity. Tabs are stupid and they mess things up when I paste stuff. I like to watch the world burn.
Totally agree, all my { end up on the next line, 1st spot when starting a function, last character of the keyword when starting an if/for/... section. I even put the closing one on the same line when it's single line, else either at the end of the closing line (when changing really old code) or same indent.
So indenting varies a lot, which makes most 'new' programmers go mental.
while (my code)
{ I'll do it my way }
if (! liked)
{ toughen-up }
else
{ get used to it
multi-line can go both ways...
}
The { of the else is just the 2nd, optional, part of the if statement, so I was learned to align it with the opening keyword. I do the same with the then keyword, when the language requires a then, then it's aligned with the i if if an the { with the f of if.
In the old days, when memory was expensive (in the day of 4k computers), even an extra cr/lf was worth preventing. Hence C has no then, C layout is usually { .... } for one liners... or even without the { },... I learned to program in the IT dark ages. ;)
Tabs make more sense because that’s exactly what they’re for, indents. Ignoring how it looks, which makes more semantic sense for an indent, or ? You wouldn’t use a bunch of spaces to indent a paragraph, so why would you use it to indent code?
And by using tabs the IDE can customise whether it's displayed as two character or four character deep indentation. It just makes so much more sense.
It's insane that anyone considered spaces to be a sensible default. Yet I primarily develop in C# where four spaces are the standard so that's what I use. However the reality is the IDE handles all the formatting automatically so I'm never actually typing four spaces
Well, the tab key was created to avoid repeatedly having to press space to create an indentation, but that was on typewritters, so either way, you can use spaces or tab key to indent text.
Now text editors can transform tab character ('\t') to desired amount of spaces, and I think the problem with using tab characters in code ('\t') is that system may have different configurations for the amount of space a tab char takes, making it look inconsistent on different systems, while space char is pretty much standard on every system.
I was pro tabs when I started out with software development. It just made sense, right? You press the key once, you get a single symbol, you have your indention, neat. And there is the argument that everyone can adjust their tab sizes, want it to be 2 spaces? 4? 6? Whatever? Awesome!
Then you write actual code and this perception changes. Tabs make a mess, developers often align both code and comments to make sense. That alignment only works at x-spaces and utterly breaks if you change tab width.
An example in C# with LINQ (just semi-random stuff):
var test = customers.Where(c => c.Deleted == false
&& c.Enabled
&& c.HasProducts()
&& blockedCustomers.Contains(c.Id) == false);
This kind of indention only works with spaces, not with tabs. And no, mixing tabs and spaces doesn't work (like some users claim, that you can indent with tabs and then do alignment with spaces.. nope, if you change tab with then your space alignment breaks).
Honestly, I don't care either way, I just use what my company uses and adapt. But till now it has always been spaces (even though I was team tabs in university) and now I actually prefer spaces as it just makes sense. It's consistent, it's easy, it works everywhere.
Btw. the Lemmy code editor is shit, trying to align this was trial and error for a minute :-/
Ah, I see what you mean, out of instinct I'd have put one more tab on the "whatever" line, which would break the concept. But if you manually do both the indent + alignment in spaces then it works.
Besides your IDE of choice screaming at you that you are mixing tabs and spaces that is :)
It still feels like a hack though, simply going with spaces is more uniform and works everywhere. Especially as a lot of code is viewed in browsers nowadays (GitHub, GitLab, ..) and tabs are often a mess in those environments.
Is there any actual advantage to using spaces? I have seen similar posts for a while and as a tab user I don't understand why they are any better than just a tab
I'd imagine it's because people who use spaces are either further in their career in average (because the modern programming ecosystem in general uses tabs so new devs are more likely to only know that) or they're just more serious about software development because the kind of person to die on that hill is also the kind of person who is very obsessive about other things as well.
Wait. Are tabs used more often in modern stuff? Almost everything I use does spaces and I'm not that new to programming. Been doing it for maybe 5 years. I use spaces in everything but Go.
Most text editors people use (like VSCode) generally automatically adjust tabs to be whatever the standard indent is for the project (and convert to spaces if it's necessary). As a result, indenting with tabs usually just works, and so most people just learn to do it that way. Also people are used to using tabs for indent from things like Word which they used before learning to write code. As a result, I've noticed most people use the tab key (even if their not technically "using tabs" every time they do it).
I think the deeper generational thing is in the idea that anything "just works". Like I'm a programmer, right, so I know shortcuts. Ctrl+S saves the file, simple right?
Me when I want to save a file: Ctrl+SSSS. Why? Because I don't trust it "just works". Same reason I don't trust auto save. Same reason I am stunned every time I tell windows to diagnose and fix the network problem and then it actually does.
I grew up in a time where you couldn't trust any of that shit.
So people who contribute to open source use spaces more.Thiss is probably because in a collaborative environment, you can't guarantee how tabs will look on all systems, and it may look horribly on some. An open source project is most likely to enforce a standard, and that standard kind of has to be spaces.
It makes me wonder what portion of the stack overflow survey is from people who aren't working on collaborative projects at work.
spaces: who want to be able to have accidental fractional indentation and so they can force anyone who may read their code in the future to see the indentation at the size that they intended.
tabs: who want consistent bug-resistant and logical formatting, and for any future reader to decided for themselves thier own personal best indentation size.
A possible explanation: people who want it their way at the expense of others are more likely to choose spaces, and are more likely to feel at home at a company that does exactly that in order to extract more profit from thier victi... customers.
I have to come in here and comment because I can’t let the slander continue.
You can use either spaces or tabs, both options are viable. There are different reasons to choose each. I am sick and tired of hearing elitism from people thinking they have the objectively correct answer. I’ve been in this debate for a long time and it’s more toxic now than it ever has been. It used to be that each camp fought for the virtues they liked about their choice. Now that accessibility is a mantra of the tab camp, that’s all they talk about and they assert that their values are the only ones that matter - without evidence.
There are plenty of good reasons to use spaces. The biggest of which is if you care about line lengths in any capacity. There are many reasons to care about line lengths.
Government requirements
Believe it or not, some projects still require code to be printed out, and how the code looks printed matters.
Heavy terminal use
Projects where code is frequently accessed though a terminal greatly benefits from a maximum line length.
Three-way merges
If you're ever in a situation where you want to see three versions of the code on a single screen, maximum line length matters.
I'm sure there are more.
If you use tabs, the only way to accommodate a maximum line length is to enforce a particular tab width. Which is almost always better to do by using spaces.
There is a reason almost every language style guide says to use spaces. Go is the only modern language I'm aware of that says tabs. It's mind-boggling to me that people will look at nearly the entire industry and say that they're crazy or malicious or uncaring. That obviously can't be true. The reality is that there are in fact decent reasons to use spaces.
And of course tabs are fine too. If you don't care about strict maximum line length requirements, then there isn't much of a reason to use spaces. There are few other reasons, but they're not very strong. So feel free, use tabs in your company and on your projects.
But drop the elitism where you assert without evidence that because a tiny minority of people have to spend a few hours of their time configuring their special tools to work with spaces the entire industry has to drop all their other values and preferences to save them that time.
Please, do feel free to disparage maximum line lengths, or bloated file sizes, or whatever else. Let the Holy War continue. I'm just sick of people pretending that the debate is over just because they say so.
If I had to venture a guess as to why spaces-users make more money, it's probably just because that's what all the tools are pre-configured for. People that just use the defaults and get going are likely more productive than those who rabidly obsess over something like whitespace. I expect the reverse would be true if tabs were the default. But that's pure speculation, I truly have no idea.
That's because these programmers are getting paid by the character.
This is also why Java dev pays so well.
System.out.println("Wow, so little amount of characters to print this!");
Or the slightly more readable brainfuck:
++++++++[>++++[>++>+++>+++>+<<<<-]>+>+>->>+[<]<-]>>.>---.+++++++..+++.>>.<-.<.+++.------.--------.>>+.>++.Hey! Brainfuck is a fun puzzle language and nothing someone does at a job to do money per character. Would be funny if yes
std::cout << "Wow, so little amount of characters to print this!" << std::endl;
printf("C wins again\n");p "Ruby FTW!"std::puts("Why do so many C++ programmers not use the right tool for the job?");I use tabs because I prefer 4-space indents and others might prefer 2-space indentation or the gross and unacceptable 6-space indentation.
If more than one person is working on a code base, there will likely be more than one preference, and with tabs everyone gets to just set their own tab width.
Yes, even the 3-space savages.
Tabs work fine as long as you don't align stuff. If you do, you have to assume a tab size and mix tabs and spaces.
Generally aligning stuff isn’t nice. But if you do, it’s tabs up to whatever level of indentation you’re at then spaces the rest of the way. So you wouldn’t have to assume a tab size. And the tabs and spaces have different semantic meaning (indent vs alignment) so mixing them makes sense. It's even built into Jetbrains IDEs, where it's called "Smart Tabs".
Although really just adding a level of indent is better than aligning.
This is a legit observation. However, I would argue that spaces needs a set indentation width anyway, so if tabs had a set indentation width that coders are expected to maintain when aligning code, it wouldn't make a difference. Enforcing that in practice may be different, but in theory it works.
It's OK, I replace all the tabs with spaces for uniformity. Tabs are stupid and they mess things up when I paste stuff. I like to watch the world burn.
Imagine not having an IDE that automatically fixes the spacing of pasted text.
Seven semicolons are the correct way to do indentation (it even alliterates):
the correct way is to never indent and never use whitespace. Saves memory.
Your goal should be 1LOC every month, no more.
Is this some kind of python meme I'm too C++ to understand?
Now, I'm completely willing to start a war about { going on the next line.
It goes on the line! If you put it below, you're wasting a line for no extra readability!
It goes on the next line, so you can have open and close brackets at the same indent depth for easy visual matching.
Your closing } goes on a new line below at the same indent depth as the line containing the open {!
PS: I know what you meant
This, as it also helps when using % to go to the matching open/close bracket when the cursos doesn't jump all around the place..
Totally agree, all my { end up on the next line, 1st spot when starting a function, last character of the keyword when starting an if/for/... section. I even put the closing one on the same line when it's single line, else either at the end of the closing line (when changing really old code) or same indent.
So indenting varies a lot, which makes most 'new' programmers go mental.
That is, unless the font used messes it up. ;)
That’s horrible.
Why isn't the else curly lined up with the end of the else word? I'd your gonna go crazy might as well go all the way I guess 😜
The { of the else is just the 2nd, optional, part of the if statement, so I was learned to align it with the opening keyword. I do the same with the then keyword, when the language requires a then, then it's aligned with the i if if an the { with the f of if.
In the old days, when memory was expensive (in the day of 4k computers), even an extra cr/lf was worth preventing. Hence C has no then, C layout is usually { .... } for one liners... or even without the { },... I learned to program in the IT dark ages. ;)
Wonder what the x-axis is? Survey year? Years of experience? Caffeine intake?
Anyway, I can hardly join a holy war -- I code in assembly most comfortably, which I'm pretty sure is heresy these days.
But you get smaller files with Tabs: https://www.madskristensen.net/blog/performance-of-tabs-vs-spaces-in-html-files ;)
That's cause they pay us by the byte the suckers.
Imagine not using a minifier
I can imagine that just fine
Tabs make more sense because that’s exactly what they’re for, indents. Ignoring how it looks, which makes more semantic sense for an indent, or ? You wouldn’t use a bunch of spaces to indent a paragraph, so why would you use it to indent code?
And by using tabs the IDE can customise whether it's displayed as two character or four character deep indentation. It just makes so much more sense.
It's insane that anyone considered spaces to be a sensible default. Yet I primarily develop in C# where four spaces are the standard so that's what I use. However the reality is the IDE handles all the formatting automatically so I'm never actually typing four spaces
Just don't use IDE
Well, the tab key was created to avoid repeatedly having to press space to create an indentation, but that was on typewritters, so either way, you can use spaces or tab key to indent text.
Now text editors can transform tab character ('\t') to desired amount of spaces, and I think the problem with using tab characters in code ('\t') is that system may have different configurations for the amount of space a tab char takes, making it look inconsistent on different systems, while space char is pretty much standard on every system.
I was pro tabs when I started out with software development. It just made sense, right? You press the key once, you get a single symbol, you have your indention, neat. And there is the argument that everyone can adjust their tab sizes, want it to be 2 spaces? 4? 6? Whatever? Awesome!
Then you write actual code and this perception changes. Tabs make a mess, developers often align both code and comments to make sense. That alignment only works at x-spaces and utterly breaks if you change tab width.
An example in C# with LINQ (just semi-random stuff):
This kind of indention only works with spaces, not with tabs. And no, mixing tabs and spaces doesn't work (like some users claim, that you can indent with tabs and then do alignment with spaces.. nope, if you change tab with then your space alignment breaks).
Honestly, I don't care either way, I just use what my company uses and adapt. But till now it has always been spaces (even though I was team tabs in university) and now I actually prefer spaces as it just makes sense. It's consistent, it's easy, it works everywhere.
Btw. the Lemmy code editor is shit, trying to align this was trial and error for a minute :-/
No, it doesn't? Here's the exact same text content with different tab widths:
The tabs are smaller but the spaces are the same, so the alignment remains.
Ah, I see what you mean, out of instinct I'd have put one more tab on the "whatever" line, which would break the concept. But if you manually do both the indent + alignment in spaces then it works.
Besides your IDE of choice screaming at you that you are mixing tabs and spaces that is :)
It still feels like a hack though, simply going with spaces is more uniform and works everywhere. Especially as a lot of code is viewed in browsers nowadays (GitHub, GitLab, ..) and tabs are often a mess in those environments.
JetBrains IDEs actually have it built in, it's called "smart tabs".
Is there any actual advantage to using spaces? I have seen similar posts for a while and as a tab user I don't understand why they are any better than just a tab
The indentation always looks the way you wrote it even in raw text viewers, is generally the argument.
I'd imagine it's because people who use spaces are either further in their career in average (because the modern programming ecosystem in general uses tabs so new devs are more likely to only know that) or they're just more serious about software development because the kind of person to die on that hill is also the kind of person who is very obsessive about other things as well.
Wait. Are tabs used more often in modern stuff? Almost everything I use does spaces and I'm not that new to programming. Been doing it for maybe 5 years. I use spaces in everything but Go.
Most text editors people use (like VSCode) generally automatically adjust tabs to be whatever the standard indent is for the project (and convert to spaces if it's necessary). As a result, indenting with tabs usually just works, and so most people just learn to do it that way. Also people are used to using tabs for indent from things like Word which they used before learning to write code. As a result, I've noticed most people use the tab key (even if their not technically "using tabs" every time they do it).
I think the deeper generational thing is in the idea that anything "just works". Like I'm a programmer, right, so I know shortcuts. Ctrl+S saves the file, simple right?
Me when I want to save a file: Ctrl+SSSS. Why? Because I don't trust it "just works". Same reason I don't trust auto save. Same reason I am stunned every time I tell windows to diagnose and fix the network problem and then it actually does.
I grew up in a time where you couldn't trust any of that shit.
I generally trust things that "just work" so long as I know why and under what conditions.
Yeah, I have my tab key set up to insert spaces. I meant the characters being used, not the key used to write them.
Exactly, and do you think the majority of people who took the survey considered that distinction?
[ ] tabs [ ] spaces [x] why would I even care, I press tab and the editor puts either a tab or a number of spaces, couldn't care less...
I'd assume this is a product of space users being older and thus earning more, but that is wild speculation.
Someone here made a longer explanation in a blog post why it's that way and what this corresponds to: https://evelinag.com/blog/2017/06-20-stackoverflow-tabs-spaces-and-salary/index.html
So people who contribute to open source use spaces more.Thiss is probably because in a collaborative environment, you can't guarantee how tabs will look on all systems, and it may look horribly on some. An open source project is most likely to enforce a standard, and that standard kind of has to be spaces.
It makes me wonder what portion of the stack overflow survey is from people who aren't working on collaborative projects at work.
But with tabs each contributor is free to choose how the indent looks. If it looks horrible on some system, that’s a configuration issue.
Isn't that exactly the point of using tabs?
For your viewing pleasure. https://youtu.be/SsoOG6ZeyUI
So the two camps are:
spaces: who want to be able to have accidental fractional indentation and so they can force anyone who may read their code in the future to see the indentation at the size that they intended.
tabs: who want consistent bug-resistant and logical formatting, and for any future reader to decided for themselves thier own personal best indentation size.
A possible explanation: people who want it their way at the expense of others are more likely to choose spaces, and are more likely to feel at home at a company that does exactly that in order to extract more profit from thier victi... customers.
Casualty / coincidence
Edit: causality/coincidence
Did you mean "causality" ?
Don't be mean to the tab user.
nop
But what about their DTF?
Down to fuckness? I suppose a greater score on this metric might help career in certain specific circumstances.
Well, spaces are superior, so…
I have to come in here and comment because I can’t let the slander continue.
You can use either spaces or tabs, both options are viable. There are different reasons to choose each. I am sick and tired of hearing elitism from people thinking they have the objectively correct answer. I’ve been in this debate for a long time and it’s more toxic now than it ever has been. It used to be that each camp fought for the virtues they liked about their choice. Now that accessibility is a mantra of the tab camp, that’s all they talk about and they assert that their values are the only ones that matter - without evidence.
There are plenty of good reasons to use spaces. The biggest of which is if you care about line lengths in any capacity. There are many reasons to care about line lengths.
I'm sure there are more.
If you use tabs, the only way to accommodate a maximum line length is to enforce a particular tab width. Which is almost always better to do by using spaces.
There is a reason almost every language style guide says to use spaces. Go is the only modern language I'm aware of that says tabs. It's mind-boggling to me that people will look at nearly the entire industry and say that they're crazy or malicious or uncaring. That obviously can't be true. The reality is that there are in fact decent reasons to use spaces.
And of course tabs are fine too. If you don't care about strict maximum line length requirements, then there isn't much of a reason to use spaces. There are few other reasons, but they're not very strong. So feel free, use tabs in your company and on your projects.
But drop the elitism where you assert without evidence that because a tiny minority of people have to spend a few hours of their time configuring their special tools to work with spaces the entire industry has to drop all their other values and preferences to save them that time.
Please, do feel free to disparage maximum line lengths, or bloated file sizes, or whatever else. Let the Holy War continue. I'm just sick of people pretending that the debate is over just because they say so.
If I had to venture a guess as to why spaces-users make more money, it's probably just because that's what all the tools are pre-configured for. People that just use the defaults and get going are likely more productive than those who rabidly obsess over something like whitespace. I expect the reverse would be true if tabs were the default. But that's pure speculation, I truly have no idea.
I let the editor handles the formatting, so I make no money