alt Hacker NewsI'v been coding now for like 15 years and I'm not old enought to understand the debate between spaces vs tabs :)
I guess my IDE choices never surface the issue for me... visually they just look the same. I cannot say which codebase uses spaces which uses tabs. I never even think about it. I just smash tab character and don't care that there have been spaces. Or enter or { and IDE does the indentation. I just choose not to press space 2-4-8-16 times in a row.
Now I hope I won't get bulldozed over by HN crowd...
Replies
Spaces vs. tabs causes a lot of issues for Python programmers who share their code with other programmers. The other place where spaces vs. tabs is an issue is with makefiles, probably one of the most annoying features of POSIX.
Well, the tabs vs spaces had been mostly resolved and spaces won. But obviously it was never about what physical keys to press, nobody on the spaces side would spam the space bar to indent stuff (except maybe in the unfortunate situations of having to use an editor with no choice of setting the tabulator to emit spaces, or a textfield in a non-editor UI where the tabulator cycles the focus instead).
I'm in the same boat, I always just press tab and let my IDE or text editor fill in with N spaces.
Granted, I'm also someone who heavily encourages the use of Black as the Python formatter in projects I'm on, specifically because it has no configurable options - can't have a holy war about formats if nothing can be changed.
> "understand the debate between spaces vs tabs"
The reason spaces won is that it's not (spaces) vs (tabs), it's (spaces) vs (tabs AND spaces).
Oh, for Pete’s sake. The bodies from this holy war are barely cool…
One of the main arguments for tabs over spaces was always that people wanted to configure how much space a level of indentation makes up on screen.
With tabs pretty much every editor except something like notepad.exe could do it since ancient times, with spaces the editor needs to do a bit more processing, so you were a bit more restricted in editor choice, if you really were bothered so much by the indents chosen in the project.
So it is actually quite similar to the ligature discussion. It would be good if the code looked the same for everybody but now instead of saying "But 8-space indents waste so much space on the screen :(" some people now go "But I don't like seeing things like != or -> instead of modern Unicode symbols :("