Programming

Tabs let you define how big you want each indent to be

…except when they don't. Many common environments have a hardcoded tab size of 8, which is insanely big for using it for indentation.

Another accessibility reason for tabs: when using a braille display, each space takes up one character cell, so indenting with four spaces eats up four cells. Indenting three times with four spaces each eats up 12 characters already. Tabs only take one character cell each, so three indents = three character cells used.

The fact that there (I assume?) isn't a braille oriented text editor that can handle space-based indentation in a smarter way is a bit depressing. Maybe the solution should be better tools based around accessibility rather than convincing everyone to switch to tabs, which is a project that will just never succeed.

Code formatter and run auto format

I wish every language had a gofmt, this is such a non-debate (tabs are indentation, spaces are alignment)

Neither tabs or spaces are good. The correct way is to leave no whitespace in the code at all. It's unnecessary and adds to processing time.

Everyone should aim for 1LOC per commit

Tabs for indent, spaces for alignment. This is the way, I can't believe people are still fighting that ?

Years ago there was no way to share IDE settings between developers.

You ended up with some developers choosing a tab width of 2 spaces, some choosing 4 spaces and as there was no linting enforcement some people using 2-4 spaces depending on their IDE settings.

This resulted in an unreadable mess as stuff was idented to all sorts of random levels.

It doesn't matter if you use tabs or spaces as long as only one type is consistently used within a project.

Spaces tends to win because inevitably there are times you need to use spaces and so its difficult to ensure a project only uses tabs for identation.

IDE's support converting tabs into spaces based on tab width and code formatting will ensure correct indentation. You can now have centralised IDE settings so everyone gets the same setup.

Honestly 99% of people don't care about formatting (they only care when consistency isn't enforced and code is hard to read), there is always one person who wants a 60 charracter line width or only tabs or double new lined parathensis. Who then sucks up huge amounts of the team time arguing their thing is a must while they code in emacs, unlike the rest of the team using an actual ide.

I've always wondered why some people tout "forcing a consistent appearance across environments" as a pro for spaces. That's a bad thing.

To be honest I'm surprised code format converters aren't ubiquitous. Let the repo have it's master format, enforced on commit. Then converters translate into each developer's preferred standard dialect on checkout and back again on commit.

I consider tabs for indentation a failed concept.

The idea is good, but it evidently failed. Most guidelines and newer Tools recommend or require or use spaces for indent. They have their reasons too.

The prevalence of spaces makes it hard to make a contrary argument for tabs. By now, I don't think it's worth even if it had reasonable advantages.

Editors/IDEs that parse syntax can adjust space indent too. A mixture for indent and alignment is not obvious for everyone (I always display whitespace in my editors and am deliberate and consistent, but many people and editor defaults won't be). Some defaults of four or eight space-width tab display is atrociously wasteful and inaccessible.

Spaces are a good enough baseline. It works well enough. And most importantly it works consistently. That's why it won in prevalence and use.

Tabs for indentation/increased scope, spaces for alignment. The best answer.

Yesterday, I shared some spicy takes. A few were particularly controversial—most notably, that I correct Gif the correct way (with a soft G)

And I stopped reading there.

This is a holy war that I will gladly fight again and again! I can't believe that soft tabs are more popular, especially in python!

Tabs take less space (space as in space in storage, like free as in freedom) tbh.

The argument for having tabs adjust depending on your ide sounds better than it is in practice. Someone formatting code to look nice with width 4 will look horrendous for someone who uses width 8.

Spaces makes it uniform and captures the exact style the original dev intended

I think calling one way better than the other is flawed. The reason the title is saying that tabs are objectively better is because they are used in addition to where spaces are used elsewhere. You could make the same argument in favor spaces due to keeping things simpler.

The argument of having variable indent size for tabs so viewers can decide how big they are is imho legitimate but also not the goal as it's addressing something that teams generally agree on. There is max characters per line, brace placement, general code style and rules. Yes we can eject the indentation from the rules that are agreed on but once again simplicity over complexity has an equal say.

In the end it doesn't matter that much, a good programmer will be able to work in either setting, the Editor will do most of the work anyways.

With all that said, spaces all the way!

Seems there's not much else going on

laughs in lisp

Nah, I'll keep on sticking with spaces or whatever the language's formatter uses. Ain't no way am I mixing tabs and spaces, will just stick with spaces.