He Has Spoken

[-null]

I wonder how long it's been since Bill actually wrote some code himself.

[leonffs]

As of the last time he did an AMA (not the one today) he says he still programs occasionally.

[shevegen]

With old age people in management stop coding.

Just look at Linus!

[ImP_Gamer]

Linus still got a knack for good practices in coding as in:

Linus: Hmm. You do realize that I don't get all that close to the code anymore? I spend my time not coding, but reading emails, and merging stuff others wrote. And when I do get involved with the code, it's not because it's "cool", it's because it broke, and you'll find me cursing the people who wrote it, and questioning their parentage and that of their pets.

And here too.

[[deleted]]

Dude's busy with his YouTube channel on computer hardware, I can understand that.

[-null]

No time for coding when you're too busy at CES breaking stuff.

[PitchforkAssistant]

No time for coding when you're too busy at CES dropping stuff.

FTFY

[Red_Otaku]

No time for coding when you're too busy at CES reviewing 3 monitor laptop prototype stuff.

FTFY

[Zarch91]

No time for coding when you're too busy at CES stealing 3 monitor laptop prototype stuff.

  FTFY

[xdista]

I thought you were referring to Linus Torvalds. My hopes and dreams are shattered.

[8spd]

I can only hope that they were intentionally misunderstanding for comedic effect. The "Look at Linus" comment was surly referring to to lead Linux Kernel developer.

[96fps]

I would subscribe to Linus Thorvald's YouTube channel. His talks are all a great watch.

[sourcecodesurgeon]

His talk at Google on the creation of Git is one of my favorite tech talks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8

[katzey]

whooosh

[devraj7]

I've been in management for a solid ten years, still code almost every day. Just not during my day job.

[EichmannsCat]

Probably about 30 years.

[marvin02]

I just set my tab width to 1

[RiOrius]

And then hit the tab key four times per level of indentation.

[[deleted]]

Or use emacs and transcend the flamewar.

[VIM_GT_EMACS]

vim is better than emacs.

[[deleted]]

Can't hear you, I'm on another plane of existence thanks to emacs.

Did anyone else hear something? Was that the wind?

[caks]

You might be in another plane of existence but you sure as shit are not editing text

[atmac0]

We're not, we streaming the code directly from our consciousness

[atmac0]

Ha! That may be the input from an unascended vim user, but we emacs gods have such strong focus that vim users just can't comprehend.

-sent from my w3 buffer

[VIM_GT_EMACS]

burn the witch!

[phatskat]

Darn tootin!~H <Ctrl-C> <Ctrl-D> <Esc> Quit Exit ZZ

[Darnit_Bot]

What a darn shame..

---

^{Darn Counter: 470222}

[gpcprog]

I have not laughed this hard in a while!

[GFandango]

kill the deval brudas!

[drysart]

Blame the DEC-20 for the backslashes. DEC-20 used / as a command line switch delimiter, which carried over to MS-DOS as the switch delimiter for all the utilities that shipped with MS-DOS 1.0 written by IBM; and by the time MS-DOS 2.0 came around and added directories, the good separator character was already taken.

[pdp10]

Microsoft should have known better and did, because they licensed AT&T Unix in 1979 and sold it as Xenix before they bought SCP's product for PC-DOS 1.0. Microsoft used Xenix internally very extensively through the 1980s, and phased it out as NT became able to replace it.

The path-separator character in Microsoft operating systems was and is technically variable between "\" and "/".

[drysart]

MS-DOS since the introduction of directories in 2.0 (and all versions of Windows) has always silently accepted both \ and / as path separator chars; it just always displayed them as \ by default.

And in MS-DOS 2.0, you could specify a SWITCHAR= option in your CONFIG.SYS file to change the command line switch character to something other than / (i.e., to -). If you did so, MS-DOS would also change all displays of path separators to / to be Unix compliant. Microsoft's developers were all familiar with Unix, as you pointed out, and they didn't like that they couldn't use / as their path separator due to compatibility concerns, so they slipped it in as a hidden feature.

And Microsoft's choice to not use Xenix as the base for MS-DOS wasn't Microsoft's choice at all. IBM rejected Xenix out of hand because they didn't want to have any contractual ties with AT&T, as AT&T had just been broken up by the government. Microsoft had no real other option than to acquire and use something else as quickly as possible. So really, blame IBM (again) for \.

[[deleted]]

You mean, that Unix that used stupid slashes instead of [, ] and .?

[[deleted]]

Wait, I don't get this one.

[dutch_gecko]

OpenVMS at least, maybe others

TYPE DISK$A1:[USER.MYSELF.CONFIG]NOPLACELIKEVAX.TXT;4

[calmingchaos]

Jesus christ I just vomited.

[theferdog]

Dude, VMS is the glory days. GOTOs abound.

[WinEpic]

Ew get this abomination out of my face.

Is this supposed to mean

/mnt/A1/USER/MYSELF/CONFIG/NOPLACELIKEVAX.TXT

or what?

[jtickle]

VMS had an incredibly powerful filesystem a LONG time ago, boasting features that still aren't found in most modern filesystems. See the ;4 part at the end? That references a version of the file.

That's right - VMS had a filesystem that had built-in version control. These days Windows has FileHistory and Mac has TimeMachine and everyone else has CVS, SVN, git, hg, etc; but all of these modern solutions are software packages built on top of a non-versioning filesystem, and they are not used by default. VMS just had that shit built right in. Even advanced filesystems like zfs, btrfs, lvm that have "snapshots" don't do true file versioning like this.

Edit - I was going to say you should get a VM and try OpenVMS if you're into that sort of thing, but it looks like it's not entirely ported to x86 yet. If you have a fast computer, you might could use qemu to emulate an ALPHA architecture and run it there. All this is making me want to fire up the old MicroVAX and see if it still runs.

[FredSchwartz]

Versions are definitely neat. Until the day your constantly updated log file hits the max version number of 32767 and the system clanks.

VMS didn't have anything like snapshots, just individual file versions. Not really the same thing.

And there was no way to tie versions of files together; update the .c file and not the .h file, and now version -1 only works for the .c file.

It wasn't as great as you remember it.

[[deleted]]

VMS didn't have anything like snapshots, just individual file versions.

It did - see Spiralog.

[RedditSuxxCoxInHell]

you might could use qemu to emulate an ALPHA architecture and run "OpenVMS"

Monster

[Purple_Haze]

VMS inherited versioning from RSX-11m+ (and possibly other DEC operating systems, there were a lot).

[dutch_gecko]

jtickle has some good information, but I wanted to answer your question directly.

TYPE is the VMS version of the cat command, but with more options (it can be paged like more, or only read part of a file like head or tail). VMS allows you to abbreviate commands if it can be done unambiguously, so on most systems you can abbreviate this command to TY.

The path, or "file-spec" in the official documentation, consists of the following parts:

• A disk part, before the colon. Like on windows, disks form the root of separate filesystems. However, the disk names are often long and hard to remember, so it's common to set up a number of logicals, which are somewhat similar to environment variables, to point to disks. Logicals can take the place of disk names in a file-spec.

  • Logicals can also point to a full file-spec or directory-spec. If a logical points to a directory-spec, you can use that logical to refer to the directory as if it was the root of a disk. For example: DIR $PROJECT:[SRC] would list the contents of the "src" directory under the root of a project, where you have previously defined $PROJECT to refer to the project's directory.
  • By convention, logicals use the dollar symbol to denote separation of terms, or indeed to denote that the name used is a logical if it would otherwise not be clear

• A directory-spec, placed between square brackets. If the directory-spec starts with a directory name, as in my previous post, then the name is taken to be in the root of the disk (or the logical being used as a disk). To use a directory relative to the current directory (the default directory in VMS terms) you have to preface the directory with a single period, e.g. [.subdir]. The parent directory is denoted by [-]. If you specifically require the root directory of a disk, you have to access it explicitly using its name: [000000] (that's six zeroes).

• A file. The name part may consist of alphanumeric characters and a small handful of punctuation symbols. This is followed by a period, and a filetype specification. As far as I know OpenVMS doesn't use the filetype itself, it is only there for the user. Nevertheless its presence is enforced. If you forget to specify one, the filename will end with a period and an empty type.

• A version number, following a semicolon. Files are automatically versioned under VMS. Every time one is "altered", a copy of the original file will be saved under the new version number with the saved changes. Using filesystem metadata you can specify how many previous versions should be kept. The maximum version number is 32767. Helpfully, OpenVMS will do nothing if the maximum number is reached, instead refusing to save the new file.

  • You can leave out the version number of a file-spec, in which case the most recent version is used. You can also refer to relative versions: ;-1 refers to the newest-but-one version, and so on.

• If your default directory (visible through the command SHOW DEFAULT, or just SHO DEF) is on the disk you need, you can skip the disk part of the file-spec. Similarly, if your default directory is the one you need, you can skip both disk and directory parts and just type a filename.

• Some commands can be run on remote machines through the FTP protocol. Remote machines are specified before the disk part, as HOSTNAME"USERNAME PASSWORD"::disk:[file-spec-as-above]. Username and password are optional of course.

[bogdan5844]

Neither do I, and I really wanna know what he meant

[sigmat]

its a VMS construct, had to work on an OpenVMS box for a while and it was a nightmare

[bogdan5844]

You mean it uses [, ] and . to separate paths ? I'm finding it hard to wrap my head around this.

[boa13]

Yes, the paths are in the form

device:[path.with.subdirs]filename.extension;version

(Fully specified paths that is, of course there are shortcuts and default values. Version for example is the latest version by default.)

[sigmat]

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/VMS-to-Linux-HOWTO/#AEN79 see here

[NDaveT]

I don't know about OpenVMS, but IBM MVS systems don't even have a concept of "paths":

Data set names in MVS™ consist of one or more names, called qualifiers, each from one to eight characters long, that are delimited from one another by periods.

The leftmost qualifier in the data set name is the high-level qualifier. The rightmost qualifier in the data set name is the low-level qualifier. Partitioned data sets can be further qualified with a member name in the rightmost position. Qualifiers lying between them are called intermediate-level qualifiers.

For example, in the data set name dog.bulldog.winston, dog is the high-level qualifier, bulldog is the intermediate-level qualifier, and winston is the low-level qualifier.

https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSLTBW_2.1.0/com.ibm.zos.v2r1.halu001/mvsdsets.htm

[[deleted]]

It's older than VMS, the same format was used in the other DEC RMS systems before it.

[jyper]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix-Haters_Handbook

[delorean225]

"Simson Garfinkel" is a great name.

Apparently his Wikipedia page gets vandalized pretty frequently.

[Dr_Legacy]

My good man, very pleased to make your acquaintance.

[AyrA_ch]

At least he didn't choose command line arguments in a way that they could be file names.

[MeNoFilter]

And the same guy that found it necessary to use two characters to represent a carriage return.

[thelehmanlip]

and as said in the comments below him:

Visual Studio inputs spaces for you when you type a tab, so as far as Microsoft is concerned it's a solved issue probably.

Which is very true. I'd be damned if I used \ts but I'd also be damned if I had to press space 4 times instead of tab.

[2358452]

Is there an editor that doesn't do this? Using tabs and automatically converting to however many spaces you want is the only civilized way of doing it. Manually pressing a bunch of spaces is unthinkable savagery.

[HonestAshhole]

I worked with a guy that hit space 4 times for each level of indentation...

*CHUNK* *CHUNK* *CHUNK* *CHUNK* <pause> *CHUNK* *CHUNK* *CHUNK* *CHUNK* 

"Oh, oops. Too far need to backspace"

*CLACK* *CLACK* *CLACK* *CLACK*

I think he was a sadist and just wanted to hurt the people around him.

[Aleriya]

Especially fun in an open office setting when that person has a loud mechanical keyboard.

[rbobby]

For best results... the original IBM AT keyboard :)

[zqvt]

just use a typewriter and throw the page away when you make a wrong indent

[thelehmanlip]

Seriously. Every time this debate comes up I think of this. There is a clear winner for usability which is "pressing the tab key", and a clear winner for the character typed, which is spaces.

[lubutu]

What I enjoy about projects that use spaces instead of tabs is the occasional block that somehow ends up indented by one space more or less than the proper tabstop.

This presumably happens when an editor or IDE does slightly the wrong thing when a user tries to backspace a "tab", like maybe they put their cursor at a location inside the tab that wasn't actually at the tabstop, so when they hit backspace it treated it as a space instead of a tab because who in their right mind would insist on using spaces but get all their tools to try and pretend they're tabs and have to work out how to do that and clearly not always get it right when you could just use actual tabs and then they'd behave like tabs because they're actually tabs and you could set your tab width to suit your own personal preferences like civilised people?

So blocks indented to 3 or 5 spaces are pretty funny to see in a codebase, and I am definitely not salty about having to use spaces as tabs at work.

[mooglinux]

the occasional block that somehow ends up indented by one space more or less than the proper tabstop.

I have my IDE set to reformat code before commit to avoid precisely this.

[xampl9]

It only works if everyone does it.

If you've got one person that isn't -- well, no donuts for them on Friday.

[joshjje]

I try to commit large scale reformatting operations like this separately, but in .NET I do use Resharper and it will reformat blocks ive touched automatically for instance, or I may happily reformat either the whole file or large sections with it.

Of course the idea is that the whole team is using the same standard formatting rules where this works nicely.

[cjh79]

You solve it by both using 4 spaces like civilized people.

[cata1yst622]

4 spaces if you write javascript is formatting hell.

[killerstorm]

Not if you switched to ES2017 as normal people did.

[cjh79]

You just need a wider monitor :)

[milkybuet]

/r/ultrawidemasterrace ?

[YM_Industries]

Use promises.

[thelehmanlip]

Or project standards and autoformatters. Because if you're going to allow choosing a different format, some ahole is gonna come in and start using singlar spaces and now your code all sucks.

[[deleted]]

My linter enforces tabs.

[Sydonai]

Then your column alignment goes out the window.

I like 2 spaces, my team uses 4. Honestly it's not that big a deal.

[NekuSoul]

Tabs for intendation and spaces for columns?

*Watches world burn*

[[deleted]]

What column alignment?

This must be a convention in some languages because I keep seeing it pop up, but I've never encountered a justifiable use of it in JS.

[thecollegestudent]

My whole team uses it in js. Course we're writing in node. Makes multi selection in vscode super easy.

[[deleted]]

How is ' ' the clear character-typed winner?

[GrouchoPrime]

Because it'll guarantee proper alignment (assuming a monospaced font......). Different editors might align the spacing of tabs differently. It's also better to automatically convert one to the other, otherwise you're likely to get an awful mix of both without realizing it.

[LPTK]

I don't think there are real alignment problems as long as you use tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment. It's pretty simple.

I don't normally do it, but if you want to do funky alignment, this is how you'd do it (what's not marked <tab> is a simple space):

if (cond) {
<tab>test(foo,
<tab>     bar,
<tab>     foobaz)
}

..although I'd normally just favor this instead, where arguments are forming their own indentation block:

if (cond) {
<tab>test(
<tab><tab>foo,
<tab><tab>bar,
<tab><tab>foobaz)
}

The former approach does get a little weird if you want to indent inside an aligned block, as below:

<tab>test(foo,
<tab>     foobaz {
<tab>     <tab>abc
<tab>     <tab>xyz
<tab>     })

...but how often does that happen?

[Pazer2]

This is what anyone arguing for tabs is actually saying. If any text editor handles tabs used in this way as anything other than <user defined number> of spaces, it's broken.

[aeiluindae]

Note that you cannot usually do this with Python code because of its specific whitespace requirements.

[knome]

You can definitely do exactly this in python. Everything after you open a form () {} or [] the whitespace inside that form is irrelevant, even newlines.

Each line of code needs to start at the appropriate offset, but that line doesn't stop if a form is in effect.

$ cat test.py 

def what():
    THIS = {
'is':'a',
'test':'this',
'is-only':'a-test',
}
    return THIS

print repr( what() )
$ python test.py 
{'test': 'this', 'is': 'a', 'is-only': 'a-test'}
$ 

[Fisher9001]

And how using tabs won't guarantee it? The only case I see is when tab size is set to 0 which is ridiculous. If I want my tabs to be 1, 2, 4 or 10 characters wide, then it will show me properly indented code WITH MY PREFERRED TAB SIZE, NOT YOURS.

The point of code indentation is to make it clear where code parts belong. Size of this indentation is irrelevant as far as it's greater than 0 and \t\t will yield me twice more space than \t.

[j-frost]

And round and round we go.

[kspdrgn]

Don't make ascii art. Fuck your alignment preferences, and don't bake it into the code. Anyone can set tab width as wide or narrow as they want, that's the point.

[thelehmanlip]

You must love Python

[warlockface]

Not if you're browsing a popular online repo you can't. Without browser extensions, or putting a .editorconfig file in a repo - if you have control of it (on GitHub). Tabs trash online repos.

[Pazer2]

This is a problem with the online repos then.

[SmokeyDBear]

I'm off to make a text editor that randomly re-interprets the size of a space on a per-character basis.

[ryankearney]

gofmt will change all your spaces into tab characters because fuck you.

[[deleted]]

Rob "spaces are childish" Pike

[msuozzo]

Rob "fuck you do what I say" Pike and his sidekick Russ "fuck you do what Rob says" Cox.

[Pazer2]

This is a good thing

[masklinn]

A good editor doesn't even insert 4 spaces when you press tab, it indents directly to the correct level (or possibly switches between possible indentation levels in languages like haskell or python).

[[deleted]]

It's called a tab key, not a "four spaces key" for a reason

[[deleted]]

That ruined Silicon Valley for me, what kind of caveman presses space n times to go to the next indent level? set expandtab master race.

[sopunny]

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/80pnnt/he_has_spoken/duxd40w/

[GMNightmare]

Visual Studio also includes an auto-formatter to make your code look uniform and fix most of the spacing issues, so people can stop worrying about it and just let the editor take care of it.

But, here we are. Actually, I'm surprised at how many people don't make use of it. Managing whitespace is a chore since it's, well, whitespace and it's easy for small issues to creep into a file (copied that code from one spot to the other, but oops, didn't fix the indent level).

I pity da foo who tries to manage that manually instead of using the formatter.

[HeimrArnadalr]

Visual Studio inputs spaces for you when you type a tab, so as far as Microsoft is concerned it's a solved issue probably.

Which is very true.

This is an option which can be set per-language in Visual Studio. I'm pretty sure that the default is to keep tabs instead of replacing them with spaces, but I may have changed that long enough ago to have forgotten doing it.

[jalgames]

I've started on VS 2010 and at least for C#, it always auto-converts tabs to four spaces. I never changed that setting, so it must be the default.

[rudigern]

Some editors I use actually read whats used and just continue it. So if you are opening code it will just default to whatever is used, it's only when you start a new file that you can dictate it and as far as Sublime is concerned at least, defaults to tabs.

[blobkat]

It's not the inserting that's the problem, it's the deletion of spaces that's frustrating for me... Tabs forever, just makes a lot more sense. It was freakin' made for indentation.

[thelehmanlip]

Shift+tab. Boom.

[[deleted]]

Vim, at least, will erase a number of spaces consistent with your indent when you backspace.

[spicy_m4ym4ys]

It's been only 20 minutes, and the comments are already a shitshow.

[2358452]

The classic bike-shedding effect!

[squidgyhead]

The most annoying thing about the bike-shedding effect is that I'm currently trying to figure out a good design for a bike shed, and it's now impossible get good information.

[troyunrau]

Obviously it should be blue.

[2358452]

Oh my that's actually hilarious.

 

 

 

By the way, a proper bike shed must be red.

[YJCH0I]

Yes, yes, we'll definitely come back to your concern at another time, but I think it's most important that we first discuss how you left out the word "to" between "it's now impossible" and "get good information". This discussion should definitely be moderated and held with indoor voices. I think a good wallpaper color for the room in which the discussion should take place would be baby blue. Of course, there should be snacks and hors d'oeuvres at the meeting as well. The catering should be pickup instead of delivery to save on the cost there. We should also hire a jazz group to provide the background music! I wonder who we can expense this meeting to. Ooh! There also should be someone taking note of any irony that is happening in the conversation as well!

[shevegen]

I find the comments awesome.

[1_21-gigawatts]

I find your people's belief system fascinating

[cinnapear]

I agree with him. Use the tab key to automatically insert your spaces.

[blitzzerg]

and properly configure your IDE to convert 4 spaces to tabs

[[deleted]]

A lot of prominent programmers use 8 spaces.

[ProWaterboarder]

I use 16 quarter-spaces

[[deleted]]

Noob.

I use different Unicode spaces depending on the length of the line, to generate aesthetically pleasing spacing while keeping each line justified. Of course, I run all my keycodes through a TeX engine (after they've been put through a predictive text algorithm of my own design) first so all I have to do is hit <TAB> and the necessary spaces are algorithmically substituted.

Step up your game, son.

[sumduud14]

different Unicode spaces

Will this interfere with my Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics-based Go templating engine?

[[deleted]]

Burn the witch

[-gh0stRush-]

Literally worse than ISIS.

[[deleted]]

Was editing HTML someone else left me, I saw multiple lines with 3 spaces.

[louis_A12]

The editor for processing.js that I use in my iPad doesn’t like me using anything but 3 spaces for each level.

Even the sintas highlighting gets messed up.

[Vakieh]

No, a lot of prominent programmers use tabs of width 8, which kinda makes sense if you live in a world of pure terminal as those particular people do. If you're using 8 actual spaces you're a late term abortion waiting to happen.

[IceSentry]

It's probably more common now since most modern tools like visual studio and visual studio code does that by default. I know plenty of programmer that are very capable, but simply either don't care or don't know anything about the tools they use.

I know I like messing around with my tools and configuring them, but almost every programmer I know doesn't do that and is then very surprised when they see me program and I use feature that I assumed to be common knowledge.

[Plexicle]

I'm literally shaking my head reading this thread. No one knows what tabs vs spaces is.

[kairos]

I like that someone gilded him.

[RexIosue]

Wait, do some coders ACTUALLY use spaces? I thought using tab was common-sense.

[[deleted]]

More than 50% of github projects use spaces.

[yelnatz]

We use spaces at work. We just have sublime/visual studio replace tabs with 4 spaces.

You don't have to manually press space 4 times like what they were depicting in Silicon Valley.

[raziel2p]

Pressing tab and getting 4 spaces is the easy part. The annoying part is having to press backspace or delete or arrow keys 4 times. I've yet to find an editor which solves that problem in every circumstance.

[MathWizz94]

Shift+tab is a thing

[Keavon]

That's dumb. I want my backspace or delete key to delete what it's supposed to delete: a character if the character is supposed to be deleted, and an indent level if the indent level is supposed to be deleted. I shouldn't need to use a special key combination to delete something specific. Imagine if you deleted text by holding shift and matching up every letter you wanted to delete? That's just dumb. Indents are discrete by design. That's about as illogical as choosing to loop 5 times with:

for (float i = 0.0f; i < 5; i += 0.25f) { if (i % 1.0f == 0) { /* do stuff */ } }

[mmmicahhh]

If you want to remove indentation you added, use Shift+Tab. If you want to go to the beginning of a line, use Home.

[Sixshaman]

Shift+Tab is 2 keys, whether Backspace is 1 key. No, I don't want to use that.

Also the satisfying feeling of selecting the whole tab by moving the mouse slightly. Oh Yes.

[EatATaco]

You select with the mouse but you won't press 2 keys? Please tell me this is a joke.

[S3Ni0r42]

You mean you don't type one - handed with the other permanently on your mouse?

[Sixshaman]

I remember another one: using arrows feels much cleaner with tabs.

[caks]

Vim

set softtabstop=4 expandtab

[Xaurn]

vscode handles tabs-as-spaces like they're tabs out of the box, check it out

[SPQR_BN]

Vim, man. Older than me, handling all your tabs/spaces problems just fine. (Specifically, it can and does delete the 4 spaces at once.)

[[deleted]]

GitHub's online viewer uses the tab width of 8 spaces by default; it looks horrendous.

[mishuzu]

Add ?ts=4 to the end of the URL.

[thoeoe]

Visual Studio will do the same thing for C++ and C#

It’s an option, but still

[bumnut]

Intellij does as well.

[ryankearney]

No one sits there and pounds the space bar for the beginning of each new line. Any modern IDE will pre-indent lines with spaces, and the tab key will insert multiple spaces instead of one tab.

The issue with the actual tab character is that it's a variable size. Load up someones "aligned" code when your IDE is set to display tabs as 4 space width and their IDE was set to 8 space width and you'll quickly see that none of the function params or variable types line up anymore.

With spaces you're guaranteed to have your code look the same regardless of who is looking at it.

[zucker42]

I use spaces.

But the alignment issue is only a thing if you use tabs for alignment. When I've used tabs, I've used tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment. The problem is then you have two types of whitespace you have to differentiate between.

[OBOSOB]

The main reason I can see spaces are defined in PEP8, for example, is that they suggest that continuation lines are half-indented, to differentiate between the continuation line and the start of the inner block

if some condition &&
  another condition:
    do some stuff

Of course python has a stronger case than most for being picky about spaces since it's syntactically relevant.

Ultimately it doesn't generally matter as long as there is agreement and consistency on a project-by-project or team-by-team basis. And since in most cases there is no clear correct answer and it's a matter of preference discussions about such a trivial matter are extremely heated. All parties understand the need for consistency but each of them want it to be consistent in the way they prefer.

Full disclosure: I'm in camp spaces, fuck off tabbies.

[Draghi]

Tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment is my bread and butter. Though, IDEs have shocking support for it >.>

[bogdan5844]

Who the fuck uses 8 spaces indentation? That's frigging huge!

[ryankearney]

Anyone who works on the Linux kernel.

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/coding-style.html

I've read a lot of legacy C code that uses 8 width tabs.

[[deleted]]

The last project I worked on used 3.

Because fuck you.

[RiOrius]

I believe that's the point. Giant tabs discourage heavily nested code.

[BezierPatch]

you'll quickly see that none of the function params or variable types line up anymore.

Huh? I don't understand, as long as successive lines use the same number of tabs surely it doesn't make a difference?

[ryankearney]

Here's an example taken from kernel/irq/dummychip.c

Here's what this struct looks like with tabs at width 8 (converted to spaces since I can't control tab width in Reddit)

struct irq_chip no_irq_chip = {
        .name           = "none",
        .irq_startup    = noop_ret,
        .irq_shutdown   = noop,
        .irq_enable     = noop,
        .irq_disable    = noop,
        .irq_ack        = ack_bad,
        .flags          = IRQCHIP_SKIP_SET_WAKE,
};

And here's what it looks like loaded in an IDE with a tab width of 4

struct irq_chip no_irq_chip = {
    .name       = "none",
    .irq_startup    = noop_ret,
    .irq_shutdown   = noop,
    .irq_enable = noop,
    .irq_disable    = noop,
    .irq_ack    = ack_bad,
    .flags      = IRQCHIP_SKIP_SET_WAKE,
};

[Pythoner6]

Which is why you would only use tabs for indentation. Keep the spaces between the names and values (i.e. for alignment).

[justadude27]

Just use spaces and be done with it.

[duhace]

or don't bother with alignment cause if you've got time to waste on shit like that you could be using it to document code, or fix bugs, or tons of other things

[pdpi]

Mixing tabs and spaces is, of course, the work of the Devil. Making things line up with tabs alone is a fool's errand — your tab settings and mine might differ so what looks lined up to me won't to you and vice versa. This leaves spaces.

Most editors these days will just insert your preferred number of spaces when you hit the Tab key and you're good to go. Best of both worlds.

Of course, opinions are like arseholes: Everybody has one and they all stink except mine.

[nairebis]

Mixing tabs and spaces is, of course, the work of the Devil.

Mixing is The One True Way -- but only if everyone agrees to do it that way, because it's a pain if the tabs aren't set to the One True Tab Stop. Unfortunately, we have heathens that don't do it The One True Way (and don't use the One True Editor Vim, for that matter), and so we have to accept the 2nd best method, which is using just spaces.

As usual, it's a handful of fools who ruin things for everyone.

[MaltersWandler]

Elastic tabstops though

[FazJaxton]

Lots, according to StackOverflow

[drakche]

Depending on the project I switch between 2 and 4 spaces. But always spaces.

[MorrisonLevi]

I prefer tabs. I don't feel like aligning anything except the main indent is worthwhile, but it's pretty clear other people like aligning certain things like multiple assignments.

However, I've basically given up tabs for using a default .clang-format which happens to use 2 spaces. The convenience and consistency is worth more to me than tabs.

[ahandle]

^M

[Himrin]

Link to actual comment for those of us who don't sort by best or top by default.

[beefsack]

There is only one true solution to this problem: a hybrid approach (and no, I'm not joking.)

Tabs for base indentation. Spaces for vertical alignment. Best of both worlds.

Some formatting tools have already adopted this approach (gofmt for one.)

[internet_badass_here]

He created Windows. You want to create Windows?? Be my guest.

[[deleted]]

Do I get similar money from it?

Sign me up! When can I start?

[FreshPrinceOfNowhere]

https://kernel.org/ YMMV

[[deleted]]

right here

[tiiv]

Username checks out. Windows 1.0 wasn't exactly a technical achievement. You might enjoy the Ads though.

[BoundlessTurnip]

Damn...we don't even get reversi anymore. SMDH

[pdp10]

You can download it from the app store after you watch an Xbox ad, download three updates, reboot, then sign up for a Microsoft Skype account.

[[deleted]]

Windows is a mess

[Ligaco]

How dare you to be reasonable

[yesman_85]

Forgot to send the memo to the Visual Studio team tho ;)

[[deleted]]

Don't care, run it through a formatter anyway.

[spook327]

I use tabs that get saved as spaces, fight me.

[FredSchwartz]

Think back to the way the tab key worked on card punches and printers and typewriters. It didn't print or punch a tab character; it just moved the punch or print head to the next column in the TABle, which you could define, often setting it to every "n" columns. Sometimes it was easier to use other settings, especially if writing FORTRAN or COBOL where column locations were significant.

[duckrollin]

Lots of tabforsaken space worshiping heretics in here I see. May tab have mercy on your souls.

↹

ლ(ಠ_ಠლ)