Comment on Tabs are objectively better than spaces - gomakethings.com
Pyroglyph@lemmy.world 1 year agoyou can never trust how someone else has their tab configured
Why on earth would I care how someone else has their editor configured? It’s none of my business, and none of yours either.
azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Because other people are fucking morons and their editor doesn’t have visible whitespace enabled - or it does but they don’t give a shit.
Therefore these fucking morons have anywhere between 2 and 8 spaces-per-tab configured and will happily mash the tab key however many times is convenient for them to align their code or comments because they don’t understand shit about fuck when it comes to indentation (or they don’t care). Now I open their file and everything is predictably misaligned. Spaces and tabs are mixed from one line to the next, and in particularly egregious cases no tab width I can locally set on the file will make it readable because multiple different morons used different tab widths to align with tabs - sometimes within the same goddamn function or comment.
Have you ever tried to read an important technical diagram in ASCII art aligned with tabs by different people with different IDE settings? Because I have. Emphasis on tried.
Pyroglyph@lemmy.world 1 year ago
This is a solved problem: Enforce linting before committing using something like Git Hooks / Husky.
No, because we live in the present and use proper tools for diagrams. SVG diagrams tend to be common nowadays. I’m aware you can’t read them raw, but realistically the intersection between people who need to read important technical diagrams and people who don’t have access to a web browser is vanishingly small (dare I say nonexistent?)
azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Tell me you develop with modern languages without telling me you develop with modern languages.
Try linting perl, or bash.
Like yeah 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.
Pyroglyph@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.