Developers Who Use Spaces Make More Money Than Those Who Use Tabs (2017)

https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/06/15/developers-use-spaces-make-money-use-tabs/

by nan0 • 7 years ago

92 148 7 years ago

stackoverflow.blog

sideshowmel• 7 years ago

:set expandtab

ChrisSD3• 7 years ago

More people drown after having eaten an ice cream.

firethief• 7 years ago

Age is the obvious confounding factor; have you tried controlling for it?

im3w1l• 7 years ago

And warm weather.

catoc• 7 years ago

spuriouscorrelations.com

travbrack• 7 years ago

* based on one survey of self-reported data

wwweston2• 7 years ago

In case anyone wonders why someone might answer "both" (other than an entirely undisciplined approach):

Tabs for line indentation, spaces for every other kind of alignment is one philosophy. It's the one that seems to hit the sweet spot for most of the issues that I care about (cross-editor consistent yet flexible management of line indentation depth as controlled by hits of the tab key + tabstop setting).

But if you're running the project and decide spaces are The One True Way™, I'll figure out a way to get the editor to do it for me and ask you for a raise for the trouble (and, of course, market standards). ;)

umvi3• 7 years ago

I'll figure out a way to get the editor to do it for me and ask you for a raise for the trouble

You don't have to "figure out" anything. It's the default of every IDE I've ever used.

I press tab, VSCode inserts 4 spaces. I press shift+tab, it deletes 4 spaces.

Nobody actually presses spacebar 4 times to indent unless they are forced to use vim on some remote machine.

rhoyerboat• 7 years ago

Nobody actually presses spacebar 4 times to indent unless they are forced to use vim on some remote machine.

Totally, hazard pay factor. ;)

..but I do it because of habits learned in python shell and also because of that cowboy character on the Simpsons cartoon that called himself OCD about the number 4 and then counted 1,2,3,4 tapping his foot and shooting his gun into the air.

styglian• 7 years ago

Nobody actually presses spacebar 4 times to indent unless they are forced to use vim on some remote machine.

Even then, you can just use >> and << in vim; as long as it's set up correctly it'll insert spaces.

Works with whole sections in visual mode too ("v, down, down, down, >" will indent four lines).

godelski2• 7 years ago

Nobody actually presses spacebar 4 times to indent unless they are forced to use vim on some remote machine.

My PhD advisor does... His preferred editor is vi (not vim, but vi)

wwweston2• 7 years ago

It's the default of every IDE I've ever used

Which is probably not every IDE or editor.

I press shift+tab, it deletes 4 spaces.

How entirely intuitive and not-awkward compared to hitting delete.

they are forced to use vim on some remote machine.

Vim is not exactly unpopular as an editor of choice.

But overarching all that -- the ;) at the end of my comment should have been a clue that I was not sincerely arguing that figuring out how to use spaces for tabs is an involved task. Even somebody using vim (whether forced or by choice) should know `:set expandtab`. Most editors worth investing in will provide a convenient way of doing this.

Rarer are the editors that will also let you change indentation width on the fly while expanding tabs to spaces, though, which is generally easy if you use tab characters for indentation. I'm not super familiar with VSCode, but having just fired it up and tried it out, maybe it can do this if you turn on Detect Indentation, though it doesn't seem to be the default, and I haven't put it through the paces for less trivial cases.

Izkata• 7 years ago

Are you sure you meant vim, not vi? 'Cause...

:set expandtab

forgot-my-pw• 7 years ago

This is why tools like gofmt is great. No more debates about spaces vs tabs.

ThorinJacobs• 7 years ago

I answered "both" because I'm not running all of the projects I'm working on and some of them prefer tabs and others spaces - so I just go with the convention that that particular project uses.

jakear2• 7 years ago

The problem with “tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment” is that it voids the claimed tab-benefit of “anyone can configure tabs to be whatever width they want”.

leerob• 7 years ago

For all my JavaScript developers - just gonna leave this here.

https://standardjs.com/

rhacker2• 7 years ago

Wouldn't this make sense?

https://medium.com/@hoffa/400-000-github-repositories-1-bill...

So the number of people that prefer spaces far outweighs the tabbers.

Now, take the pool of people that use spaces and tabs and let them compete for a 100k job. 9 times out of 10 even if randomly hired it will be a space person.

Also, as a by the way, on the medium post. The reason Java has so much tabs is specifically due to the default Eclipse formatting that prefers a mix Tab/Space approach. Which is absolutely horrifying in my personal opinion. I don't have any numbers but Eclipse probably holds 80%, followed by Netbeans and/or IntelliJ. (both of which default to spaces)

NobodyNada• 7 years ago

Take the pool of people that use spaces and tabs and let them compete for a 100k job. 9 times out of 10 even if randomly hired it will be a space person.

But you'll get the same result when they compete for a job that pays poorly. If all other factors were equal, the distribution of developers who prefer tabs should match that of developers who prefer spaces.

By your argument, people named Steve would make less money, because they're outnumbered by people not named Steve.

hencq• 7 years ago

This could still be true though. There are more likely to be outliers in the large group than in the small group. However, there is a lower bound on the number (nobody makes below $0), but no upper bound. So the distribution is likely to be skewed.

So yes, people named Steve would make less money (though this argument might not work as well for people named Jeff, Warren or Bill I guess).

rhacker2• 7 years ago

Very true, but something is still askew - the same will happen for women, minorities, etc.. Any time a large group and a small group, technically the small group tends to get less pay! What's going on? (I totally concede to your point, but now I'm left confused and wondering!)

Edit - ahh, hencq has a reasonable explanation for that.

coldtea2• 7 years ago

So the number of people that prefer spaces far outweighs the tabbers. Now, take the pool of people that use spaces and tabs and let them compete for a 100k job. 9 times out of 10 even if randomly hired it will be a space person.

Err, is the distribution is only affected by the number in each category (and not e.g. tab/space preference), then you'd be able to sample the same results for 30k jobs. 9 times out of ten it will be a space person there too.

Thus, if the 28,657 survey respondents are also randomly distributed, the ratio of poor vs good paid would be the same as real life, as would be the ratio of tabs vs spaces.

In other words, one wouldn't expect a skew in one category in favor of the other (if the choice wasn't a factor). Of course correlation != causation, but correlation can point to causation, or to a third, unknown factor that correlates with both attributes.

qzygr2• 7 years ago

I like tabs because it allows developers to configure their editors with whatever width they desire.

inanutshellus2• 7 years ago

tabs don't work when you visually align code. e.g.

  some.method(param,
              param2,
              param3)

The above doesn't work if the creator of the code uses a different tab width than I do. If you want it to, you need to use an IDE that automatically recognizes the difference between indentation and alignment... which is frankly too much trust in others if you care about it.

If a default install of an IDE (including vIM) will screw up your code.... you might consider rethinking your strategy. :-)

qzygr2• 7 years ago

    some.method(param,
        param2, param3)

insertnickname• 7 years ago

That code would be misaligned anyway when someone changes the name of `some` or `method`.

You should format it like this (regardless of whether you use tabs or spaces):

  some.method(
    param,
    param2,
    param3
  )

mixedCase• 7 years ago

The above doesn't work if the creator of the code uses a different tab width than I do.

Tab proponents suggest alignment to be done with spaces, and indentation to be done with tabs.

TotempaaltJ• 7 years ago

Honestly the I've lost my appreciation for alignment. I've been writing it like this for a while now:

    some.method(
        param, param2, param3)

And it's no more or less easy to read.

dvt2• 7 years ago

I prefer spaces purely out of consistency reasons.

Some systems say a tab is 8 spaces, others say it's 4. Some editors can set a tab to any customizable N spaces. But a space is always a space so your code will look like you intended (or should I say indented) it no matter who's looking at it.

tedmiston4• 7 years ago

While I agree with you personally, I could see the counterargument of: A tab is always a tab, and I can tweak my IDE to render a tab as however many spaces I like (2, 4, 8, etc) without changing the code.

dvt2• 7 years ago

In a lot of cases though, you can't change what a tab is (consider looking at code on GitHub).

qes• 7 years ago

I can tweak my IDE to render a tab as however many spaces I like

Sure, IDE's are easy (though many people use multiple IDE's and/or editors across multiple machines).

I've also got a couple diff tools, a few VCS's, also the online parts of VCS like web-based pull request review UI's.

Tabs also tend not to play as nice with vertically aligned elements, if you prefer that for things like say the '.' on multi-line chained method calls, or longer function parameter lists.

dschnurr2• 7 years ago

Reasons to prefer tabs: https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/c8drjo/nobody_t...

anchpop• 7 years ago

I don't understand this reasoning, I can set my editor to show x-spaces at the beginning of a line as however many I want. So I can make code indented with 2 spaces look like it was indented with 4.

shawnz• 7 years ago

Why would you "intend" for your indentation levels to be a certain pixel width on the reader's screen? Shouldn't that be the reader's choice?

natvert• 7 years ago

Ok, but 2 or 4 spaces?!

Dylan168072• 7 years ago

3 looks pretty nice in a lot of code...

graywh• 7 years ago

heretic

TimTheTinker5• 7 years ago

Please don't do that. Just... please... don't.

I will have trouble controlling my frustration if I ever have to work on a codebase built with 3 spaces per indentation.

hathawsh• 7 years ago

Yes. :-) The right answer depends on the project. I really appreciate it when projects have .editorconfig files so that indentation just works.

https://editorconfig.org/

Sohcahtoa823• 7 years ago

Also, max line width should be 120 characters. 80 is too limiting if you're using sensible variable names like you should.

Bootwizard• 7 years ago

So where does using the "tabs to spaces" tool lie here?

I technically press the tab button but my edit inserts 4 spaces.

tedmiston4• 7 years ago

If it's rendered in your editor as spaces and committed to your repository as spaces, then spaces.

I doubt many space users actually type spaces by hand (a common pseudo-counterargument against spaces).

Grustaf4• 7 years ago

It’s not about the key you use, it’s about how it’s stored. O

beardedProgmr2• 7 years ago

Those salaries are painfully low. I started at 75k. Who's making less than 50k and in such great numbers? This must be non US jobs? I question this data.

tedmiston4• 7 years ago

The data is global, hence the heavily skewed median compared to US alone. Check out the 6 bar charts that group by country.

elboru• 7 years ago

99% of the planet would disagree with you: http://www.globalrichlist.com/

beardedProgmr2• 7 years ago

We are talking about software engineers. I'm not talking about top company pay either. I don't think I've ever gotten an offer for 50k

erichurkman• 7 years ago

Or give up the fight over formatting in general and adopt a tool like [0] Black, which has no rules or options to configure and only one correct style. _You can have any any style you want, as long as it's black._

[0] https://black.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

Shorel• 7 years ago

I was going to complain about it, but I like all the formatting decisions made by black.

rfer34f• 7 years ago

That is an old post (June 2017). I thought it was now accepted that people should use tabs, until I read the comments here. From a recent post, Nobody talks about the real reason to use tabs over spaces, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20341354; if you're visually impared, using spaces make for poor accessibility. Don't be a dick, use tabs!

commandlinefan• 7 years ago

Probably because they can read their code.

dschnurr2• 7 years ago

Hopefully nobody uses an article like this to really inform their decision on which to use.

Last month there was a reddit discussion that outlined some really compelling accessibility-related reasons to use tabs, worth a read: https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/c8drjo/nobody_t...

peterlk• 7 years ago

This is one of the strongest cognitive dissonances that I have. And I have no idea why it exists. I know that rationally, tabs are really the better choice. Each user can choose how to display code in their editor.

But I just hate using them.

Maybe it was the 8 space default of vim (nano?) when I was sysadmining. Maybe it was that there was inertia, and tabs are always the thing that's causing problems. But I just can't get over it. I just don't like tabs.

ssully• 7 years ago

I really think the split is almost purely a generational thing. If your first exposure to computers/coding was using a terminal, I think you will end up leaning towards spaces. If you grew up in the post GUI world on Windows or Mac, I think you end up leaning towards spaces.

ChrisSD3• 7 years ago

It was at one time a holy war. Spaces won. I used to be strongly pro-space so I was happy. However, with time and much reflection I've soften my stance considerably.

In any case, improvements with code editors have helped a lot to paper over the differences.

ellard• 7 years ago

I have the same dissonance.

For me, I think it's from my underlying interest in being good at something without having to make compromises or handicaps. As a benign example, I rarely/almost never change the keybinds in any of the code editors that i've used because I like the idea of being able to competently use all of them in their default settings to have a consistent experience everywhere. This allows me to use another instance of VSCode/PyCharm/Eclipse/etc. that's not my own and be able to reasonably be productive in that instance. It's a little silly, but it's something that I like.

Tabs runs counter to that underlying interest to a very small degree. They're there to be customized, and there's an expectation that you are supposed to customize their appearance for each view that you use to view them if you want a consistent appearance.

To an extent, I view the debate between the two as something similar to the debate between configuration vs convention. Convention is great when you're working within the 99% of the use cases that it supports, but it becomes difficult for the folks who need to do something not supported by the built in conventions and vice versa. Some people like one, some people like the other as a matter of preference. However, there's a small subset of the population that basically need configuration for one reason or another to operate. Whether it's because you're building a product that needs a feature that the framework doesn't support to stay afloat, or in this case, they need to be able to customize the appearance of code on the screen easily to be able to perform their duties in a reasonable time. I don't know if this comparison makes sense or is reasonable.

I will say that i've ran into enough errors due to people entering tabs into places that they shouldn't that my hate for tabs has grown more than it should. This ranges from people somehow (via copy+paste or whatever) entering a tab into a form field that doesn't allow for it to other engineers doing something similar for code and causing weird issues.

Edit: formatting

_bxg16• 7 years ago

I've never understood the dislike of tabs; when I was first presented with the concept of spaces-over-tabs I was new to the industry and went along with it, assuming there was some good reason. But I've never actually found one. Tabs are so much more semantic.

seanmcdirmid• 7 years ago

One can see this as just deciding on spaces as a path of least resistance, and then taking the time saved arguing or pondering the question to make money instead.

notacoward2• 7 years ago

A thousand times this. I could come up with a whole bunch of arguments in favor of either side, but they all pale in significance compared to this.

What I really wish is that we had better ways to express indentation or alignment than just these two. Or to associate inline commentary with code other than by using either spaces or tabs to fake a two-column layout. Separating content from presentation, including affordances for the visually impaired, is practically a solved problem for other kinds of text. Why not adopt some of those same techniques for the text we work with every day?

zelon88• 7 years ago

In that thread the OP decides that the needs of a few outweigh the needs of the many. He went from trying to achieve "consistency across environments," which is very convenient and efficient to purposely making his workflow less efficient and more time consuming to suit the needs of two co-workers in an environment where his code will probably be read hundreds of times.

Develop how you want to develop and commit how your codebase is written. How is that hard? I guarantee whatever IDE you use has a feature to convert/change the indendation model of a file. Why is this even a topic?

You're not going to guilt me into using spaces because two people who read my code didn't like it. If you're using tab-width 8 I'm probably not going to like reading your code very much either. Does that mean you should change your entire workflow to suit me?

buboard• 7 years ago

Thats racist

It's probably related to the editor choices one makes? As a tabs-only person, i am probably a little more autistic, a little less social (spaces are easier to share with others), a little less open to new technologies.

inanutshellus2• 7 years ago

This has come up before. My theory is this:

Tabs are great if you work by yourself. If you work with others, you need more complicated rules to be followed like "tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment."

So...

My theory is that coders using spaces have worked in more places and/or larger places, which tend to end up paying more.

larrydag• 7 years ago

This is one of those correlation != causation articles. Probably something symptomatic as you describe.

B-Con• 7 years ago

I suspect it could be large, well-paying companies with prescriptive style guides skewing the results. eg, Google standardized on spaces for all their languages I've interacted with, maybe some others did too.

RussianCow• 7 years ago

Tabs are great if you work by yourself. If you work with others, you need more complicated rules to be followed like "tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment."

Except you don't, because you could just never align code, which completely eliminates the problem. I find that aligning code is way more trouble than it's worth.

penteract• 7 years ago

According to the blog post, the effect remains when company size is taken into account.

spacehunt• 7 years ago

If I'm reading the chart correctly, it seems that Go developers who use spaces rather than tabs actually earn more? That's quite surprising.

nostrademons• 7 years ago

It is. I wonder if it's an artifact of the other languages used at the organization, i.e. Go developers who use spaces are likely to be working on utilities or support code for a product that's primarily written in C or C++ (and probably been generating revenue for a while), while Go developers who use spaces are more likely to be working in green-field pure Go codebases that are newer with less of an established market.

jaequery3• 7 years ago

This is why the world will never make peace. If we can’t even agree on something silly as tabs vs spaces.

TimTheTinker5• 7 years ago

I don't think it's silly. I strongly dislike the ergonomics of contributing to a codebase that uses tabs.

jaequery3• 7 years ago

Those who prefer tabs have clearly not experienced the nightmare of collaborating with devs who were using spaces.

jaequery3• 7 years ago

I guess the same can be said for working with devs who Lint and those that dont

adchari2• 7 years ago

I would bet this is due to some hidden variable. Maybe older or more experienced developers have a tendency to use spaces, so their compensation reflects age/level/experience, not their choice of indentation?

scythe• 7 years ago

Tabs are adjustable, so more likely in larger teams. But devs on smaller teams probably make more as individuals. That’s my guess.

adchari2• 7 years ago

Never mind, reading the article sees him cover at least the experience, language, and location of the developers, and there is still a significant difference.

Maybe the team aspect made a difference, or devs worked at companies with strict style guidelines, which happened to be companies who pay well, or because that company is on their resume, they make more later on?

benttoothpaste• 7 years ago

I've always suspected that "go fmt" is a tool of income suppression...

writepub2• 7 years ago

Which camp does that put me in - I use the tab key for code indentation, but my editor is configured to replace tabs with 4 spaces

Grustaf4• 7 years ago

Do you think the controversy is about what key you use?

writepub2• 7 years ago

Please, oh please, do tell me what this controversy is really about.

nemetroid6• 7 years ago

Spaces.

crtlaltdel• 7 years ago

i am always amazed at how much time people sink into these discussions :D as if commonly formatted textfiles was the biggest concern people have in their day-to-day ;)

dep_b• 7 years ago

And what about developers that add spaces by using the TAB-key?

Sohcahtoa823• 7 years ago

You mean ALL of them?

Question for all of you tabs people...do you guys think that spacers are hitting the space bar 2/4/8/X times?

for_xyz• 7 years ago

Yes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsoOG6ZeyUI

vbtemp• 7 years ago

It's just cause people using tabs are not using properly configured IDEs or text editors, which reflects a lack of experience or adaptability, which reflects the lower salary.

Edit: It's also kind of funny how people in this thread are making it seem like there's some kind of controversy. There isn't: the question was settled a long time ago.

Grustaf4• 7 years ago

Can confirm

robocat2• 7 years ago

From the given data it appears that people that use stackoverflow are being paid really really low wages. Maybe people who answer online surveys are poorly paid?

My personal graphologist said that although tabbers earn more, they tend to be more focused on their work and less altruistic, so they answer less surveys.

Sampling bias is difficult to avoid in the best designed research.

stephc_int13• 7 years ago

Am I the only one who doesn't give a fuck?

Is it really a subject?

And I'm not saying that code aesthetics doesn't matter, I tend to obsess over good typography and alignment, but I use both tabs and spaces, switching depending on the code-base/context, without even thinking about it.

kpU8efre7r• 7 years ago

Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?

crazygringo• 7 years ago

I think the biggest and most obvious control is missing here -- the company they work for.

Much more likely is that companies that pay more, for whatever reason, insist on spaces rather than tabs as a required coding style.

A quick Google search reveals spaces are used rather than tabs by Google, Twitter, Mozilla, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple... so that already seems fairly suggestive as the cause to me.

TimTheTinker5• 7 years ago

I suspect part of the reason is that using spaces makes it easier to collaborate with many other developers on a single codebase. There's no worrying "How will this look to others who override the default tab width?", "How to make this line up most consistently for everyone?", "Will it cause issues for me if I override the default tab width on this codebase?", etc.

maxk422• 7 years ago

Or the language they're working in. Python devs use spaces, go devs use tabs.

But I don't think the average Python dev makes more than the average go dev.

sdinsn• 7 years ago

Python devs use spaces

Speak for yourself- I use tabs with every language

LordDragonfang2• 7 years ago

If you scroll down a little bit, they control for language and spaces are still higher across the board.

notacoward2• 7 years ago

Yep, that's pretty much. It has nothing to do with which is better. Nothing whatsoever. It's just that a handful of companies that hire a ton of programmers and pay them a ton of money happen to share the same bias, and even that's probably because of copying each other. Even if you controlled for current company, alumni of those few have probably carried the gospel even further, again no matter if it's right or wrong. It's like observing that people who dress like Wall Street brokers make more money than people who don't, without considering what else it might mean that someone works (or had worked) on Wall Street.

Koshkin• 7 years ago

4x or 8x ?

jshprentz• 7 years ago

Back when communications and printing devices were much slower, we often chose tab stops to reduce the number of characters sent. I have used this algorithm, but I doubt it impacted my career earnings.

James L. Peterson, James R. Bitner, and John H. Howard, ``On the Selection of Optimal Tab Settings'', Communications of the ACM, Volume 21, Number 12, (December 1978), pages 1004-1007.

http://jklp.org/profession/papers/tab/paper.html

tcmb• 7 years ago

(2017)

TimTheTinker5• 7 years ago

I strongly favor spaces, because using tabs adds one more thing to worry about when writing code to be read by others.

I suspect a lot of folks who work on large, multi-dev projects feel the same way. We prefer to lay out our code and indentations with the expectation of consistency for others. Spaces allow us to not worry "Will this be readable by colleagues who prefer 2-wide tabs vs. 4-wide tabs?" We just adopt a convention (2 or 4 spaces) for each codebase and run with it.

Similarly, when others have used spaces, it's one less thing to worry about when starting work on a new codebase. There's no evaluating "will this codebase look better with 2-wide or 4-wide tabs?" or "Can I override the default tab width with my preference, or will that make this codebase less readable?"

thfuran2• 7 years ago

Spaces allow us to not worry "Will this be readable by colleagues who prefer 2-wide tabs vs. 4-wide tabs?" We just adopt a convention (2 or 4 spaces) for each codebase and run with it.

I don't get it. It allows you to not worry about it by letting you just say "no, it won't be readable by you because we arbitrarily decided to make your life difficult".

Tabs are the one that let you not worry about whether people who prefer a different tab width will find the code readable because they can configure a different tab width.

TimTheTinker5• 7 years ago

That may be true for codebases that always use a single tab for each indentation level -- I get that. But to stay readable regardless of tab width, it requires a coding style that keeps indentation strictly consistent with syntactic context (not an issue in Python, since indentation is syntactically significant already).

It also limits what developers can do to align things in JavaScript, Lisp, Ruby, C#, etc. -- especially when using complex call chains/lambdas, large literal data objects, s-expressions, long parallel repetitions blocks of code, etc. In those cases, using spaces is a huge benefit, because it provides a way to scoot things left or right to make them more readable. With tabs, you can't do that unless you mix tabs and spaces -- which is not cool at all.

nemetroid6• 7 years ago

Spaces allow us to not worry "Will this be readable by colleagues who prefer 2-wide tabs vs. 4-wide tabs?"

My team uses two spaces as convention. It sucks. Nothing is readable. Whatever formatting issues would sneak in if different developers used different tab sizes would be minor compared to having to consistently read code with a quarter of your preferred indent size.

Most formatting tools should also be able to catch such errors.

robbrown451• 7 years ago

It seems to me that the benefits of tabs tend to are reduced as storage becomes cheaper, as text editors get more powerful, and as various other tools becomes smarter.

So people sticking with tabs are more typically "old-school" and stubborn in all their approaches. And that can explain the pay difference.

mjevans2• 7 years ago

Tabs clearly indicate a specific level of indent.

Spaces may or may not be rendered to a specific width in different editors, and in fixed width editors are equivalent to 'pixel perfect' rendering; the difference between a dead tree rendering that is static and an electronic metadata included document.

m463• 7 years ago

This can be summed up "developers with experience with others use spaces"

Tabs do not interact well with teams.

Spaces are a source of consistency for teams.

Basically, spaces have the same indentation for everyone sharing code while tabs do not.

To set up spaces only in your editor requires a mindful effort.

https://www.jwz.org/doc/tabs-vs-spaces.html

awkward• 7 years ago

I wonder if this is related to acculturation. I would guess that people who are trained as computer scientists or work in tech are exposed to arguments over whitespace, and more self taught people are not. Not to say that spaces are a more sophisticated choice, but that the higher paying sectors are more polarized.

maxk422• 7 years ago

My personal preference is tabs and the reason I never hear given is that I simply don't want to press a button two or four times when I can press it once. When I type a single tab: bam! code indented. When I type backspace, the indentation is removed. It's easy. When I'm using spaces -- even in an editor that expands tabs to spaces -- I have to press backspace four times to de-indent code. I end up de-indenting a lot of code because a pet peeve of mine is unnecessary conditionals. For example if you'll pardon the formatting:

  if(cond) {
    flag = true;
  } else {
    flag = false;
  }

can often be represented as just:

  flag = false;
  if(cond) {
    flag = true;
  }

and in languages that initialize variables, often the first line can be omitted as well.

I just feel like I'm stuck in molasses, having to go through several extra steps whenever I'm writing code that compels the use of spaces over tabs. That said: It's a personal preference and I'll use spaces where appropriate.

Most people's argument against tabs seems to have to do with vertically aligning code. This is a shit argument, because tabs should be used for indentation only. If your indentation is the proper number of levels then spaces can be used for any remaining vertical alignment. Tabs should be used for indentation, not vertical alignment.

Example:

  tabtabtabtabType myArray[] = {
  tabtabtabtabtab   123,    456,    789, 101112,
  tabtabtabtabtab131415, 161718, 192021, 222324
  tabtabtabtab};

It's not difficult and problems only appear when some n00b tries using tabs between the numbers in the above example to line values up. If you do that you're going to have a bad time.

bryanlarsen• 7 years ago

"I have to press backspace four times to de-indent code"

I used to only press backspace once to delete four spaces because I use a better editor. Now I press it zero times because I've integrated black, gofmt and prettier.js into my editor and it indents automatically.

umvi3• 7 years ago

When I type a single tab: bam! code indented. When I type backspace, the indentation is removed. It's easy. When I'm using spaces -- even in an editor that expands tabs to spaces -- I have to press backspace four times to de-indent code

Newer editors like VSCode handle this correctly. Tab = add 4 spaces, delete = remove 4 spaces.

But really, you should get in the habit of using tab to indent, and shift+tab to deindent (not delete). shift+tab has the added advantage of being able to deintent an entire highlighted block of code in virtually all editors.

can often be represented as just:

Well, in this case you could just do `flag = cond` but I see your point

Most people's argument against tabs seems to have to do with vertically aligning code. This is a shit argument, because tabs should be used for indentation only. If your indentation is the proper number of levels then spaces can be used for any remaining vertical alignment.

Well, a lot of people haven't configured their editors to visually see whitespace, and since it is invisible by default, it means a lot of code with mixed whitespace is committed which is a hard problem to solve. So you just configure your auto-formatter to convert everything to spaces so there is no ambiguity.

lukev• 7 years ago

All the tab advocates in this thread are like "Tabs are great, all you have to do is..."

That's why spaces are better. There's no "all you have to do." There's nothing. Just use spaces. Your code will look fine everywhere. Done.

Separation of content and presentation is a fine principle for many things, but as long as we're coding using text files, we are already far removed from that world. May as well stay simple and embrace the literal characters.

nemetroid6• 7 years ago

Your code will look fine everywhere.

...or nowhere, depending on who is reading.

nemetroid6• 7 years ago

I would be fine with using spaces if it weren't for all the spaces-users. More specifically, how so many projects seem to go for the shortest common denominator, often just two spaces. I mostly write C++, and agree strongly with the rationale given in the Linux coding style for using 8-char tabs - it promotes better design practices:

Now, some people will claim that having 8-character indentations makes the code move too far to the right, and makes it hard to read on a 80-character terminal screen. The answer to that is that if you need more than 3 levels of indentation, you're screwed anyway, and should fix your program.
In short, 8-char indents make things easier to read, and have the added benefit of warning you when you're nesting your functions too deep. Heed that warning.

firemelt• 7 years ago

I really don't understand the war behind this I always pressing tab button when I want to tabs(giving more than one space) things

Does the war is about pressing tab button vs space button?

Or is it about the underlying of it?

Afaik when We press the tab button the editor is sending a space right? Then what's with the fuss?

Developers Who Use Spaces Make More Money Than Those Who Use Tabs (2017)

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