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.
Tell me you develop with modern languages without telling me you develop with modern languages.
You say this like it’s a bad thing?
Try linting perl, or bash.
If you’re already writing Perl/Bash scripts then it would probably not take you long to write a git hook to check the beginning of each line of source to check if there’s a space or a tab character and preventing the commit if the wrong one is found. Crude and far from perfect, but still better than nothing.
if you work on a modern JS/Python/C# project, whatever, whitespace is going to be autoformatted, so the tabs vs spaces debate does not matter AT ALL.
It does though. If you read the original article then you’d know that the advantage of tabs is that everyone can choose exactly how deep their tabstops are, which is an objective benefit over spaces.
(lol lemmy bug found, can’t write the actual “left angled bracket - left angled bracket” syntax, it somehow truncates the comment)
OTOH if you use a modern auto-formattable language, then you can auto-format to tabs with a git hook or IDE plugin (and back for committing) if you want, so the debate doesn’t matter in that case. It goes both ways.
You say this like it’s a bad thing?
If you’re already writing Perl/Bash scripts then it would probably not take you long to write a git hook to check the beginning of each line of source to check if there’s a space or a tab character and preventing the commit if the wrong one is found. Crude and far from perfect, but still better than nothing.
It does though. If you read the original article then you’d know that the advantage of tabs is that everyone can choose exactly how deep their tabstops are, which is an objective benefit over spaces.
It’s not wrong to work with modern languages, but don’t pretend that you have the answer to the debate if you don’t work in a field where it applies.
Linting bash/perl is a TERRIBLE idea. Consider the following, extremely common piece of code (perl has equivalent syntax as well):
#!/bin/bash cat > testfile < < EOF test1 test2 EOF(lol lemmy bug found, can’t write the actual “left angled bracket - left angled bracket” syntax, it somehow truncates the comment)
OTOH if you use a modern auto-formattable language, then you can auto-format to tabs with a git hook or IDE plugin (and back for committing) if you want, so the debate doesn’t matter in that case. It goes both ways.