this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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Programming

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

Interesting take. I prefer spaces because each piece of code that I see with tabs has an implicit tabsize you really need to have if you don't want the code to look ugly - especially if the person has been mixing tabs and spaces - and they usually do. Sometimes unadvertently.

When you remove all tabs at least everyone is on the same page.

To the actual problem raised by the article:

I have ADHD. Two spaces per indent makes it damn near impossible for me to scan code. My brain gets too distracted by the visual noise. Someone who’s visually impaired might bump their font size up really large, and need to scale up or down the amount of space per indent. Someone might just prefer it because…

I wonder if it could be possible to adjust the "indent number of spaces you see" in code editors. Code editors are able to figure out what are indents and what are not, so in theory it should be possible. Perhaps that would be an idea for a new feature?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (5 children)

why don't we store code unformatted and have everybody's IDE display it with their preferred format applied? it would make everything easier and stop people bickering over pointless things.

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

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I used to be a tabs guy, somepoint over time, especially when I realized some of the edge cases I have in formatting only remain consistent when using spaces, I switched.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Ah yes I understand now!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I thought it was a non-issue that tooling should take care of anyway until stackoverflow published this:

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

Spaces all the way

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