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It happened.
I wrote "you're missing a tab in your python code" as an answer on StackOverflow.
I was downvoted AND told that I wasn't correct: it was missing 4 spaces and not a tab, according to the python guidelines.
Now, I haven't read them, but my Richard Hendrix fucking intensifies.
Fuck spaces. And if python guidelines talk about spaces, fuck python guidelines too!34 -
Friend: so what is this app I always see you using on your phone?
Me: devRant, it's for developers! it gives us the chance to share rants!
Friend: Wow awesome!!! so what do you guys discuss, interesting stuff huh?
Me: Spaces.... spaces vs tabs.25 -
Spaces Vs Tabs - A real world case.
So one of the menial tasks I was given here was to take a pretty mock and turn it into an HTML email template. Needless to say, I hate emails and HTML.
After many weeks of trial and error, rejection and tweaks, we're doing our final tests when someone noticed that Google's clients are chopping off the footer and saying "View Full Email".
A few searches yield that Google has a 102KB cut off for email size. We did some checks and found that we were at 104KB. I immediately thought it was my CSS inliner being a little too verbose, but as I went in to edit things, I noticed that the file was intended with spaces!
Now I'm a fan of Silicon Valley, and I recalled an episode from this past season where Richard mentioned something about saving file size by using tabs. I had never really considered that point.
So I went back into VSCode and told it to convert all of the individual templates that make up this giant email to indent with tabs...
The file size dropped from 104kb to 82kb.
I wasn't very polarized on the Tabs vs Spaces debate, but this here has given me a nice real world example as to why tabs rule.
22 -
Dear codebeautify.org,
Go kill yourself.
No one likes you. Go die.
Love,
poster983
P.S. I'm serious.
18 -
My interviews to hire a Junior Dev will begin this week. Here's how its gonna go down.
Me: Star Trek or Star Wars?
My Supervisor: WTF? How is that relevant?
Human Resources: Let's see what he says.
Applicant: Battlestar Galactica
Me: Nice. I can deal with that.
Me: Tabs or spaces when indenting your code?
Supervisor: ... ?
Human Resources : ...
Applicant: Spaces.
Me: GTFO you imbecile! Next!28 -
Really annoyed by the endless tabs vs spaces discussion.
From now on, I use 4 tabs as indentation.18 -
Saw this quote in a local newspaper. The guy is against buying laptops for school kids which I also am against but he makes the wrong argument. 25 years ago my school had computer rooms where we learnt how to code and although I don't use that language now it is still the same concepts as any modern language.
27 -
"Tabs create smaller file sizes. I run a compression company, trust me, I've devoted my life to minimalizing file sizes."
- Richard Hendricks10 -
Hello fellow ranters,
I created a poll to find out the distribution of used programming languages among us:
https://goo.gl/forms/...
I am curious, because obviously PHP is not very admired, and probably JS is the most used language around here. Lets see!
There is no information collected beside your answers. It would be awesome if you take this survey kind of seriously and do not add toooo many childish options ;)
You should have an insight into the answers after you participated. Maybe I will post some results after some time.26 -
My programming teacher at university is programming like this. I'd better not learn anything from him
30 -
IE can go fuck itself.
Today, the reason the some JS broke is because it couldn't handle tabs. Works fine in any other browser.
Replace all tabs with spaces and bam, everything works again.
😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡7 -
Apparently you make more money if you use spaces than if you use tabs
https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/06/...
10 -
And there I was thinking about being an Intern here...
NO FIGHTING OVER TABS AND SPACES IN THE COMMENTS PLEASE
20 -
Colleague: Oh i've noticed your PR uses tabs instead of spaces, we use spaces, can you change yours please?
Me: ..... can you leave the building immediately, for your own safety22 -
In grade four my teacher had a vic 20 and he let one student per week borrow it to take home. It didn't have any software but the book that came with it had some instructions on how to write some small basic programs.
1 -
>Barely ever written python before
>Gets added to a python group project
>Codes the part I'm associated with
>Runs fine after about 19 tries
>Puts it together with other people's code
>Syntax error
>Searches for the error for 2 and a half hours
>tfw other people use 4 spaces instead of a tab like I do and pythong can't handle it :(3 -
Sitting in an introduction to C++ class (I've been programming for 5 years but every job wants to see a degree even if it means taking boring intro classes)
I see the professor write code like this....
First: Ever heard of break;
Second: I know it's not wrong to write it like this but ever heard of spaces!!!!!!!
14 -
What is considered best practice for code indentation? When I'm working with HTML and Javascript my rule of thumb is 2 spaces for indentation, and with Java and Python it's 4 spaces.
Also I'm trying to break my bad habit of mixing tabs and spaces. It's messing with the laws of physics.
12 -
F*ck, for the sake of Zeus, Odin, Cernunos, and Linus Torvalds... Why the hell is 2 spaces become standard...
Okay, maybe I'm an idiotic non-idiomatic rebellious jerk or something... I don't care, I'm going back to 4 spaces. That 2 spaces things really hurt my eyes, and that f*cking linter keep telling me, "it must be 6 spaces, not 12".
Don't they ever think why we no longer use 1024x768 screen anymore? Wtf with torturing yourself to save that extra 16*n bit for every line in your file where n is count of indented indentation...
Whatever, just wtf...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions...26 -
Python seems so ... simple, yet beautiful.
(It's just ... a feeling, I only did the codecademy course and doodled on the command line by now.)
But this whitespace/tab thing and the fact that missing semicolons don't result in errors is just fucking confusing.15 -
I'm just C# boy, born and raised in a .Net world ... Today I started some stuff with JavaScript, downloaded the JavaScript standard extension for using in Vs code... It made me do things...it made indent each new line by 2 spaces! Not 4 or a tab but 2! And then what really took the fucking biscuit, it said I couldn't end my statements with semi colons! I need a strong cup of tea and a sit after that shit. How is that at all useful to anyone!? It just made it make less sense!!!!10
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I'm not being high and mighty but I wonder how come someone claims they have loads and loads of years of experience in software engineering and they cannot even write an English sentence with a space after each comma.24
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Not usually a person to rant about spacing and conventions but this is great.
4 devs, all using IntelliJ. Now IntelliJ auto-changes tabs to spaces which is nice, and GitHub doesn’t really care as long as the spacing is consistent. Now here is the fun part: 2 devs have 4 spaces per tab, 1 has 3 spaces, 1 has 5 spaces.
GitHub merge conflicts everyWHERE.
And yes it isn’t the old 2 vs 4 spaces. It’s 3 vs 4 vs 5 somehow6 -
Hi fellow code indenters,
I am a tab indenter myself because each dev on the same project can decide how much the indentation is. Some prefer 4, some 2, some prefer both depending on language.
Now I already asked a few space indenters here why spaces. Because I never heard a good argument for using spaces instead of tabs. Each time I asked I didn't get an answer.
So this time once again: why would you use spaces over tabs for indentation?
I want to make a good decision and for that I need arguments for both.41 -
I love both Tabs and spaces.
I dont understand why to just use tabs only or spaces only.
I use both.22 -
in C I use {} for ifs even when they have a single line. for some reason, my C proffesor hated this. For him, this is the equivalent of Tabs vs Spaces.15
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My friend is a 1st time programmer. When we learned about tabs vs spaces in our mandatory beginners c++ class, the friend said "what, you can use spaces?" and I said "yes, of course, like this!" and demonstrated it. The friends reply, without knowing about the controversy, made my day:
*silence*
"well, thats dumb"3 -
Spent bloody ages trying to figure out why my Modal wasn't working. There was a space in the id name :/1
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So I've taken over a project, well, not really taken over, we've been hired to add more functionality to a Wordpress site.
I have never seen such a messy code in my life... variables have mixed languages, indentation is a mix of tabs, 2, 3 and 4 spaces, camelcase, snake case, short names, long names. ' and ", no spaces after commas (gotta save those bytes doode)
Almost like it has been copypasted from everywhere.
I think I said 10-15 hours for it. I think I will spend a lot more time tidying up this code.
Hey, look, 3 index files!!
index.php
index__backup.php
index__backup_2.php
I don't dare to look into the CSS or JS, but I know I have to3 -
I was working for a client on a simple landing page. After struggling for days with the text-flow of one paragraph and trying one CSS property after another I finally realized it.
He sent me the texts in PDF format and I just copied them. What I did not know is that all the spaces in the text were non breaking spaces wich of course did not wrap like I expected.
Heureka. You bloody bitch. Never imagined having such a fucking issue in web development...2 -
...and this photo from our latest conference, shows our developers having an interesting debate about tabs vs spaces.
3 -
Dear intern, if you really really have the urge to use fucking spaces for indentation because it let's you feel like being some Google hipster, then PLEASE AT LEAST REMOVE THE SPARE ONES WHEN YOU FUCKING COPY PASTE CODEBLOCKS!!!1!!1111!
I'm perfectly OK if people wanna use spaces if they use it in an OCD-proof manner.
Nah, let's be honest: Spaces are a filthy way to indent stuff. Tabs are in a lot ways superior and if an editor can't render tabs correctly, the editor is a piece of worm puke.2 -
Two weeks is just enough time for the person who asked for the thing to forget when they asked for the estimate.
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If there was one thing (and one thing only) that I wish was unanimous amongst programmers (and that we all agreed on) is that a tab is 4 spaces.4
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I get very annoyed by sites that ask for too many privileges. If I want to comment on some post why would I give write access to all my source code repositories?
1 -
Reading a Ray Wenderlich book to try give RxSwift a go. Book is well written and going well. But I’m grinding my teeth at the fact all the code samples use 2 space indentation. Despite the fact apples standard is 4 ... and you know tabs would let us decide.
I know it’s a small thing, but it’s really pissing me off3 -
I found someone added a webapp I made to their site in an iframe.
The 'dark' box at the bottom of the screenshot is my webapp.
I don't really mind them iframing it. I hate adverts but I don't mind that much that they have adverts on their site.
I am very annoyed however that they have a huge overlay appearing on top telling people to turn off their ad-blocker. Also they use alert() to tell people to share their site on social media!
Being told to turn off my ad-block and having to close alert popup boxes are two of my most hated things.
So now I made a little update to my site so their visitors will see a nice little song playing.
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So I'm reading up on the HomeAssistant documentation to prepare for submitting to their repo. I was really excited to find such a nice repo to contribute to, but i suddenly had to reconsider when i found this:
10 -
Look, I don't really mind much whether you use tabs or spaces. But for FUCK'S sake, for the LOVE OF FUCK:
IF YOU USE TABS, DON'T TRY TO LINE UP PARTS OF YOUR CODE WITH SOMETHING ON THE LINE ABOVE BECAUSE IT WILL GO TO SHIT WHEN SOMEONE ELSE HAS A DIFFERENT TAB WIDTH SETTING.
YOU DRIBBLING FUCKPUPPET.3 -
Weather Report: Thunderstorms and heavy downpour
Stuck at office wondering whether I really hate tab more than spaces that it wore out OR is it that I use it way too much.
PS: Currently fixing the tab button
10 -
2017 and yet, here we are, still ripping up our clothes over tabs and spaces.
My bad if I missed something about this debate but I really don't get it.8 -
Years ago, one of my friends in college was taking an intro to CS class. He asked me for help on one of his assignments. It was a simple Python program, but it wasn't running as expected. I go in figuring it will be easy to fix. But everything looks exactly right. An hour later I'm tearing my hair out! It isn't even entering the function although it's clearly called. I'm beginning to feel very self conscious, as a CS major who can't even debug a 15 line program for a friend.
Then it hit me. This is Python. I used an editor macro to convert all indentation to tabs, lined them up, and it ran on the first try. Turns out, he had somehow ended up with a mixture of tabs and spaces.
I'm not sure what the takeaway is, but I think he got a surprisingly honest introduction to the life of a developer...2 -
That moment you see an argument between two developers about tabs vs spaces tjat was suppose to be a discussion about the series sillicon valley1
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to space, or to tab,
that is the question,
whether tis nobler to suffer
the slings and arrows
of outrageous space bar use
pressing four or eight times,
or to take arms against a sea of
manual spaces by using
the tab key, and by apposing
space bar's end them. -
Tinder for devs: match people based on their coding style. Tabs go with tabs, spaces with spaces and uncommented code goes with legacy code.1
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Why the flying fuck does one indent Java code with two spaces? Coding standards exist for a reason, for fuck's sake!4
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TABS OR SPACES?
It doesn't matter what you use, but use the ome you can stand with.
DONT FUCKING EVER BULLY ONE BECAUSE HE'S NOT USING YOUR "STANDARD"
Try to have some good discussion why you should use tabs or spaces and let other opinions matter. They may have some good reason for it.
PS I'm using spaces because it wont fuck up my Code if i change the OS (Windows<->Linux Server)5 -
I'm so glad I'm leaving my company soon. Big international group. At the moment they've started to change everything at our desks to make a giant open-space. Ignoring that literally 100% of the studies prove it's a bad idea for worker productivity and health. And then they dare lie to our faces that it's more productive, increases communication and makes employees happier.
Sure, with that they make savings and can add more desks... for contractors because fuck having real employees right ? It's much better to be able to fire them whenever they want !!
NO IT DOES NOT YOU FUCK FACES
FUCK OPEN SPACES, FUCK YOUR SAVINGS AND FUCK YOU -
Whenever I clone a github repo, the first thing I do is to format the code from tabs to spaces.
Tried not to do it, but the itch is unbearable.4 -
tabs vs spaces
i hate it when i cant find where i used spaces instead of tabs. just a simple mistake and it doesnt work
me: *codes makefile in codenvy*
terminal: *** missing separator. Stop.
me: *rewrites code exactly the same way in Notepad++*
me: *copy paste code to codenvy*
terminal: *compiles whole project*
wow. just wow.7 -
I never understood the ‚space vs tabs‘ war ...
Tabs can do everything that spaces can plus more:
* look the same as spaces, but its width is configurable (at least in a decent editor)
* the safe space (1 byte vs 3 or 4)
* you can decrease the intendation leven with one bsckspace keypress in every(!) editor.
So the winner can only be tabs? Why would I even limit myself with spaces?
I dont wanna start a flame war, just curious what you guys (especially the spaces lovers) think about it18 -
Regarding the never ending tabs vs spaces debate; who on earth over at GitHub thought 8 spaces was a good default value for tabs in code?4
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so the PHP Standards Recommendations part two (PSR-2) says
"Code MUST use 4 spaces for indenting, not tabs."
and i feel devastated1 -
People sometimes scream to everyone else that tabs are better than spaces, but they don't realize that their IDE most of the times automatically converts tabs in 4 spaces.10
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I use spaces in vim/nano, I use tabs in my graphical IDE which translates it into spaces. I guess I'm on the spaces side, even though I don't really mind both. But seriously, why do people keep arguing about effing whitespaces...9
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From now on, I'll be using soft tabs. I didn't know editors can help me with this before. I thought all I see are hard tabs. Am I on the right path?4
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I know this topic is tired and this isn't supposed to be a pure "REEEE SPACES BAD" kinda rant but I still don't understand why people would ever use spaces over tabs for indentation. I'm genuinely curious so please give me your arguments in favor of spaces because I just don't understand
So here's my position:
Tabs are objectively better than spaces in every single way
(I know that IDEs also do some of these for spaces, more on that later)
1. They are typed with one key press
2. They can be removed with one keypress
3. They allow for individually configurable width (some people prefer 2 and some 4 width)
4. They take up less memory (kinda irrelevant, but still)
5. You can properly navigate your code using the arrow keys which is much faster than using the mouse while typing
6. You don't have problems with accidentially having one too much or one too little
7. You don't have problems when copy pasting or moving code around (e.g. refactoring)
8. Code is much easier to select with the mouse, and
9. it's much easier clicking the right spot with the mouse where you want to continue typing, which is often at the start of a line
Apart from specific alignment, where spaces are fine (but which also almost never comes up), I just can't see a single thing where spaces are better at. So much so that most IDEs have to *pretend* that they're tabs when typing and removing them. It's so ironic yet people still defend it and big companies still use them.
I feel like I'm going mad 😨70 -
Why aren't styleguides made by democratic descisions?
Just ask 1m devs and do whats done the most.8 -
I had a project idea for creating my own cloud service based on DO spaces. Today I started.
Had the webapp done in several hours and it's already deployed. Next step: the mobile app. I tried out Flutter and I have to say, for beta it's really good! So I'll work with Flutter for the mobile app.
Excited dev here! -
I don't think there is anything more painful than seeing some programmers writing badly formatted code.
I mean how can anyone use a single space or completely inconsistent spaces and tabs.
What is more painful is that you cannot scream at them because you don't wanna be an A-Hole trying to force your methods to others. -
Python program (jython, but whatever). Half of a method isn't running. No idea what's going on.
Half hour later I start printing random garbo. Suddenly discovered A SINGLE TAB CHARACTER. everything in the method after that accidental tab was not running.
Come on python 🤦♂️...34 -
Developers who think spaces are better than tabs.
Seriously every editor other than Notepad lets you set how many spaces a tab is equal to. Stop trying to force your stupid 2 space tabs on me.4 -
I used to love tabs and absolutely despise spaces, but a combination of using IntelliJ and company code indentation convention has converted me to the dark side #spacegang4
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Boss: how long would that feature take?
Me: About 2 weeks to implement and test.
Boss: hmm, can it be done it 1 week instead?
Me: .....3 -
Since we're all doing unpopular opinions lately: tabs and spaces are not only interchangeable, but is most readable when mixed on one line.
Instead of 4 spaces or one tab, try 2 spaces, 1 tab, and another space for good measure!3 -
I haven't chimed in on this spaces vs tabs war at all on this platform, mostly because I personally don't care and adapt to my work's/project's conventions, but I just have to put this out there now.
I am honestly so confused about the entire thing since seeing a lot of recent rants on the topic. I was originally conditioned to believe that the majority of devs in the world were FOR spaces over tabs. Thus, whenever I start a project, I default to spaces.
Contrary to that, it seems most devs here (or at least those who enjoy instigating some banter) actually prefer tabs. Now, I recently binged Silicon Valley and can't help but wonder if people around here are simply jumping on that band wagon for the sake of the joke.
Side note: I also thought Vim was more widely used over Emacs but Richard Hendricks asserts otherwise there too.
I know the main arguments for both sides - spaces yield code that looks the same in all editors while tabs produce smaller code. Anybody who argues that spaces are less efficient because you need to physically press the space bar 2/4/8/etc times is just retarded. If soft tabs weren't a thing, I don't think anybody would be on the side of spaces and for that reason I believe that episode in Silicon Valley was just trying to be overdramatized and push peoples' buttons.
All of that being said, I wonder if it's just a generational/field of development thing. Would it be wrong to propose that more older devs in the field of embedded and OS development (using C and the like) are in the spaces party while younger devs perhaps more into application and web dev (Javascript, C#, and shit) are all about tabs? I'm actually fresh out of university, but like I said my preference is spaces, though I don't really care.
I'm actually interested to find out what kind of environments breed these opposing mindsets so what do you guys think?2 -
Hi all - mind if I get some advice?
Are coworking spaces worth it? I currently work from home but I'd like the opportunity to network, get out of the house more and build a better work-life separation. The options I'm looking at are in the region of £200-£250 in the city centre (Manchester, UK), which is easily within my budget.10 -
I don't know what side of the argument I'm on for tabs vs spaces. I use tab but set it to be 4 spaces.5
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Could it be that devs using spaces over tabs actually send secret messages in morse code to each other while indenting?
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When people are coding and adding hard blank spaces instead of normal spaces. Usually because of copy paste from Internet. Oh, the joy.
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Am I the only madman writing C++ with 8 spaces per tab? (Converted to spaces, to be sure. What are we, savages?!)
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My boss writes code like this:
def someFunction (someArg: String) = ...
Who does that?! A space? Da fuck?! And it's all over the code base. Whenever another dev touches any of his stuff, we correct it:
def someFunction(someArg: String) = ...
The way god intended it!8 -
I'm usually on the tabs camp, because anyone can have their editor (not notepad) render them any way they want. I prefer showing them as 2 spaces. It just feels cleaner and more subtle than 4 😀2
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Am I the only one here who knows that in Stackoverflow you have to indent your code with 4 spaces, so you tab and you get pissed ?!
I think this is the first solid argument that spaces people have on this holy war5 -
When you realise that PEP8 uses spaces instead of tabs.
All these years of Python experience vanishes in a second.3 -
Why is there so much hatred for people who use spaces instead of tabs?
I use tabs out of habit but I don't understand why people have to fucking hate the ones who use spaces so much13 -
I really don't understand why tabs vs spaces is such a big issue. I mean does anyone actually use spaces? I mean I don't think ANY developer would use spaces when you have tabs!4
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People who use spaces make more than people who use tabs. I've been doing it wrong :(
https://goo.gl/FSzv5z5 -
I love most trends around js, because often they're thoroughly thought through (not always) and make things easier.. but why the fucking fuck do all the js coding standards use 2 SPACES. Now this isn't intended to be a tabs-vs-spaces rampage rant. But this decision against tabs is like saying yes to a 50ct pencil instead of 100 dollars.7
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I check for trailing spaces.
In email.
(I want *everything* I ever type ever, to be in Sublime Text). -
Which development standards and coding styles would you recommend in a development team? My colleague @jacoKotze and I are starting to get larger projects at work and 2 more developers soon (juniors with little to no experience), so we'll need some coherence soon.
Tabs v spaces is more of a joke, looking for opinions on other things please.12 -
It's time to reconcile the religious war with a compromise: How about we use spaces for lines with indent <= 8 chars and tabs for deeper indents?
Or maybe tabs in all functions returning strings and spaces in all other functions?2 -
The right way, of course, is with spaces! Those who use tabs for indentation aren’t just doing it wrong, but they also earn less, according to Stack Overflow's 2017 Developer Survey. No more discussions, right?5
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Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs (for indentation) (stackoverflow survey). What do you use?8
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I know there is this huge argument about whether to use tabs or 4 spaces and while I'm on neither side, just sitting there using tabs, in this new project I'm FORCED to use a 1 space indentation and no line breaks in Android layout XML files format.
I sat there for about 10 minutes trying to wrap my head around d this absurd specification they agreed upon with the client. The code looks SHIT and every time I copy some beautifully formatted reference code into this project it turns into a piece of unreadable garbage.
But since I'm just a part-timer and the senior developer working on this project for some years now is much more experienced than me, I'm hesitant to criticise it more than I already did.
Maybe I'll start arguing with industry standards and the improvement for new developer to read our code... -
!rant
I've recently seen some rants about tabs vs spaces. The main argument for spaces seems to be "different editors define tabs diffently". Can someone ELI5 what does it mean? Should tab always be one character '\t'? I understand that it can be displayed with different width (usually configurable), but it still seems to me to be more uniform across editors, while for spaces some editors indent with 2 spaces and some with 4.
Please don't start a war in the comments. I don't want any other arguments for either of them. I just want to understand that one specific argument.2
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