this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023

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Programming

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156

Tabs are objectively better than spaces - gomakethings.com (gomakethings.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Anything for indent (barely matters, as long as the editor forces it to stay consistent), and fuck alignment, just put things on a new line.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

struct Ident arr = [
{
.id
= 0,
.name
= "Bob",
.pubkey
= "",
.privkey
= ""
},
{
.id
= 1,
.name
= "Alice",
.pubkey
= "",
.privkey
= ""
}
];

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Not like that, lol

Just saying, instead of this monstrosity

CreateOrderRequest(user,
                   productDetails,
                   pricingCalculator,
                   order => order.internalNumber)

Just use

CreateOrderRequest(
    user,
    ...

Putting the first argument on a separate line.

Same if you have an if using a bunch of and (one condition per line, first one on a new line instead of same line as the if) and similar situations.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

People seem to have a real issue with using new lines and I've never quite understod why.

It feels like a lot of those people are using notepad like applications instead of coding focused ones with collapsible regions etc.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

When I talk about alignment it's not about function arguments, but values, "=" signs and such. You simply cannot use tabs for that because alignment must be fixed and indentation independent:

CreateOrderRequest(
    user,
    productDetails     => order.detail,
    pricingCalculator  => DEFAULT_CALCULATOR,
    order              => order.internalNumber)

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I normally avoid that too, I find it hurts readability more than helps, plus a proper IDE will separate it with color anyway.

But yeah, the newline comment doesn't apply to this.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To each their own indeed. But my rule of thumb is: only use tabs when there's no other character before it (aka, start of line).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The emacs wiki agrees and has the correct take on this: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SmartTabs

It seems like this basic guideline, tabs to indent and spaces to align, solves the problem for everyone. It doesn’t matter what your tab width is, it’ll look “right” regardless.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This kind of "manual" alignment should be avoided for many reasons including the fact that adding/removing/changing of one parameter here may force you to modify multiple lines which on it's own is annoying but this will also show up in the diff during review making it harder to grep what was actually changed.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I personally favor code readability over patch readability. But I reckon this is a matter of preference so I can understand how you might not like that.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Yeah I agree I don’t find alignment very useful. It’s more work for dubious benefit, and god forbid you change one of the lines.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The way god indented.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I almost scrolled past this one

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

seconded on not aligning things. its the whole source of the problem in the first place and doesnt even serve a purpose

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It does help with reducing thrashing between edits in git diffs. Or rather, opinionated autoformatters do, which is the only reason I bother with alignment.