Yesterday, I shared some spicy takes. A few were particularly controversial—most notably, that I correct Gif the correct way (with a soft G)—but I also got a lot of emails asking me to elaborate on a few of them.
Today, I wanted to talk about how tabs are objectively better than spaces. This won’t take long.
Tabs let you define how big you want each indent to be, and spaces do not.
Do you think it matters if getting a large number of people to switch to tabs is an achievable project at all? Maybe I am a bit cynical but this seems to me like something that is actually very difficult to do.
When faced with a problem like this I think it makes more sense to approach it from a perspective of what would be a practical way to actually address it and refusing to do that does I think in its own way betray a different kind of cynicism.
For the record what I’m saying isn’t that I wouldn’t switch to tabs for the sake of people with various disabilities, I’m saying that spaces are slightly better than tabs if you don’t have any relevant disabilities so if there is a way to have the cake and eat it to that would be a nice bonus, but that’s honestly besides the point.
You are treating this as a binary/zero-sum game. Will we get to 100% use of tabs (or spaces)? No. Will we get a “perfect” viewer made and then adopted by all visually-impaired people? No. Making people aware that a fairly mundane choice has a negative impact on others might change their behavior, or at least challenge it.
Change like this is incremental, so just having the conversation, and asking you to consider that making a small change to your config might help some people down stream is something. Asking you to bring this point to the next conversation about tabs vs. spaces, is helpful.
I’m saying that spaces are slightly better than tabs if you don’t have any relevant disabilities
This is my fundamental issue with your original statements, and this thread: It’s a subjective choice that you think is slightly better than removing a barrier/major annoyance for an entire group of people that may want or need to interact with your code. It’s closing the door on possibility for a minor personal preference.
I think that there might be a fundamental missunderstanding here: I’m not saying that we shouldn’t use tabs to accomodate people with disabilities, I’m saying that better editor features seems like a better “solution” to the problem.
In the abscence of editor improvements I agree that it makes sense to use tabs to accomodate disabilities, I just don’t think that it will catch on that mutch. I don’t think that spaces (imo) being slightly better is a good reason to not accomodate dissabilities by using tabs right now, but I do hope there is a more editor oriented solution some day because I think it would propably be better both for people with visual disabilities and without.
Being in a slightly argumentative mood might have led me down towards validating this false dicotomy between editors and tabs, and I apologize for wasting both our time because of this.
You do have a point that I personally might have more influence over if a given project has spaces or tabs than if better editor features are made, but I think that there can be a point to having the poor support for programming that is apparently offered by screen readers to take some place in the discussion as well since that is a potentially more important piece of the puzzle.
I can’t imagine that there is much of a point to keep replying after this so I think I’ll leave it here.
Do you think it matters if getting a large number of people to switch to tabs is an achievable project at all? Maybe I am a bit cynical but this seems to me like something that is actually very difficult to do.
When faced with a problem like this I think it makes more sense to approach it from a perspective of what would be a practical way to actually address it and refusing to do that does I think in its own way betray a different kind of cynicism.
For the record what I’m saying isn’t that I wouldn’t switch to tabs for the sake of people with various disabilities, I’m saying that spaces are slightly better than tabs if you don’t have any relevant disabilities so if there is a way to have the cake and eat it to that would be a nice bonus, but that’s honestly besides the point.
You are treating this as a binary/zero-sum game. Will we get to 100% use of tabs (or spaces)? No. Will we get a “perfect” viewer made and then adopted by all visually-impaired people? No. Making people aware that a fairly mundane choice has a negative impact on others might change their behavior, or at least challenge it.
Change like this is incremental, so just having the conversation, and asking you to consider that making a small change to your config might help some people down stream is something. Asking you to bring this point to the next conversation about tabs vs. spaces, is helpful.
This is my fundamental issue with your original statements, and this thread: It’s a subjective choice that you think is slightly better than removing a barrier/major annoyance for an entire group of people that may want or need to interact with your code. It’s closing the door on possibility for a minor personal preference.
I think that there might be a fundamental missunderstanding here: I’m not saying that we shouldn’t use tabs to accomodate people with disabilities, I’m saying that better editor features seems like a better “solution” to the problem.
In the abscence of editor improvements I agree that it makes sense to use tabs to accomodate disabilities, I just don’t think that it will catch on that mutch. I don’t think that spaces (imo) being slightly better is a good reason to not accomodate dissabilities by using tabs right now, but I do hope there is a more editor oriented solution some day because I think it would propably be better both for people with visual disabilities and without.
Being in a slightly argumentative mood might have led me down towards validating this false dicotomy between editors and tabs, and I apologize for wasting both our time because of this.
You do have a point that I personally might have more influence over if a given project has spaces or tabs than if better editor features are made, but I think that there can be a point to having the poor support for programming that is apparently offered by screen readers to take some place in the discussion as well since that is a potentially more important piece of the puzzle.
I can’t imagine that there is much of a point to keep replying after this so I think I’ll leave it here.