6 ms·

This reminds me of Silicon Valley’s main character preferring tabs to spaces because they use less bytes, despite his own product being for... compression! I p

This reminds me of Silicon Valley’s main character preferring tabs to spaces because they use less bytes, despite his own product being for... compression! I personally prefer spaces so that under any circumstances, the code reads the same as the author intended (whether you’re in an editor or viewing a file with a CLI tool). Are we really counting bytes in this day and age?

hashingroll 5y ago
The argument for tabs really goes that time is spent much more on reading code than authoring, so it should be optimized and customizable (tab width) for the reader.
- anyfoo 5y ago
  Tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment.
  - d110af5ccf 5y ago
    I used to feel very strongly about this. Then I started using Common Lisp and discovered the abomination that is tabstop. This archaic "feature" leads to tab width that varies across the line and seems to be hardcoded in every text editor out there. Worse, it's only useful if using tabs for alignment which is completely broken anyway! At some point I intend to patch the source for the editors I use to remove this nonsense. Admittedly this is something of an edge case - how many languages other than Lisps involve alternating layers of indentation and alignment? The more common C like languages don't suffer from this at all. At this point I'm largely convinced that more or less all of our tools, languages, and conventions are poorly thought out, brittle, and inelegant. /rant
    - lispm 5y ago
      usually I turn off tabs for indentation in Lisp editors. On a Lisp Machine: (setq zwei:*indent-with-tabs* nil)
  - meowface 5y ago
    I've settled on "follow the existing/upstream project's style; if it's a new project, follow the language's idiomatic style". I personally (strongly) prefer spaces over tabs, but I've inherited/forked plenty of projects that use tabs in JavaScript for example, and I just set my editor and formatter to use tabs in that project. I think the ideal situation is a language with an official or at least commonly accepted formatter, so that existing and new projects will essentially always follow the same style and you never have to think about it. Like "go fmt" always using tabs. I don't like tabs, but I like that kind of enforced consistency way more than I dislike tabs. That's also why I like using opinionated third-party formatters like prettier and black. Combined with pre-commit hooks, you almost never have to think about style and can just focus on the code. Plus diffs are cleaner.
saagarjha 5y ago
Considering that most code get read by more than one person, I think hardcoding the author's preferences in how it should be read is strange and in some cases inaccessible.
- d110af5ccf 5y ago
  This. Author chose two spaces per indent and proceeded to nest blocks 5 levels deep? Guess I have to run it through a code formatter now just to read it. Alternatively, author chose eight spaces per indent and proceeded to nest things? My tiled windows only have ~100 columns, thanks so much for breaking my workflow with your poor choices.
  - gpderetta 5y ago
    But why not? These days reformatting on the fly is fast and easy. Especially if you enforce formatting conventions on commit (so you can automatically reformat into a canonical version).
    - d110af5ccf 5y ago
      Because typically code will be read far more than it is written and by far more people than contributed to it. In many cases I won't have the relevant tooling installed let alone know how to use it because I don't use that language myself. (For example, a library written in Rust that exposes C bindings whose prebuilt artifact I might download and link against.) That being said, I 100% wholeheartedly approve of enforcing code formatting (among other things) on commit. Pre-commit hooks and linters are both awesome.
      - gpderetta 5y ago
        If you do not have the relevant tooling you can still read the canonical formatting. If you want custom formatting, I don't think that expecting your editor to reformat on the fly is a big ask. At the end of the day that exactly what tab proponents expect.
sellyme 5y ago
> so that under any circumstances, the code reads the same as the author intended I write all my code in notepad.exe with the font Wingdings. I hope that if you ever read any of my code you'll respect my intent with how it's displayed.

hashingroll 5y ago

The argument for tabs really goes that time is spent much more on reading code than authoring, so it should be optimized and customizable (tab width) for the reader.

anyfoo 5y ago
Tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment.
- d110af5ccf 5y ago
  I used to feel very strongly about this. Then I started using Common Lisp and discovered the abomination that is tabstop. This archaic "feature" leads to tab width that varies across the line and seems to be hardcoded in every text editor out there. Worse, it's only useful if using tabs for alignment which is completely broken anyway! At some point I intend to patch the source for the editors I use to remove this nonsense. Admittedly this is something of an edge case - how many languages other than Lisps involve alternating layers of indentation and alignment? The more common C like languages don't suffer from this at all. At this point I'm largely convinced that more or less all of our tools, languages, and conventions are poorly thought out, brittle, and inelegant. /rant
  - lispm 5y ago
    usually I turn off tabs for indentation in Lisp editors. On a Lisp Machine: (setq zwei:*indent-with-tabs* nil)
- meowface 5y ago
  I've settled on "follow the existing/upstream project's style; if it's a new project, follow the language's idiomatic style". I personally (strongly) prefer spaces over tabs, but I've inherited/forked plenty of projects that use tabs in JavaScript for example, and I just set my editor and formatter to use tabs in that project. I think the ideal situation is a language with an official or at least commonly accepted formatter, so that existing and new projects will essentially always follow the same style and you never have to think about it. Like "go fmt" always using tabs. I don't like tabs, but I like that kind of enforced consistency way more than I dislike tabs. That's also why I like using opinionated third-party formatters like prettier and black. Combined with pre-commit hooks, you almost never have to think about style and can just focus on the code. Plus diffs are cleaner.

saagarjha 5y ago

Considering that most code get read by more than one person, I think hardcoding the author's preferences in how it should be read is strange and in some cases inaccessible.

d110af5ccf 5y ago
This. Author chose two spaces per indent and proceeded to nest blocks 5 levels deep? Guess I have to run it through a code formatter now just to read it. Alternatively, author chose eight spaces per indent and proceeded to nest things? My tiled windows only have ~100 columns, thanks so much for breaking my workflow with your poor choices.
- gpderetta 5y ago
  But why not? These days reformatting on the fly is fast and easy. Especially if you enforce formatting conventions on commit (so you can automatically reformat into a canonical version).
  - d110af5ccf 5y ago
    Because typically code will be read far more than it is written and by far more people than contributed to it. In many cases I won't have the relevant tooling installed let alone know how to use it because I don't use that language myself. (For example, a library written in Rust that exposes C bindings whose prebuilt artifact I might download and link against.) That being said, I 100% wholeheartedly approve of enforcing code formatting (among other things) on commit. Pre-commit hooks and linters are both awesome.
    - gpderetta 5y ago
      If you do not have the relevant tooling you can still read the canonical formatting. If you want custom formatting, I don't think that expecting your editor to reformat on the fly is a big ask. At the end of the day that exactly what tab proponents expect.

sellyme 5y ago

> so that under any circumstances, the code reads the same as the author intended I write all my code in notepad.exe with the font Wingdings. I hope that if you ever read any of my code you'll respect my intent with how it's displayed.