Comment by akamaozu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by akamaozu | Hacker News Reader

Unfriendly towards new programmers? I don't see it.

This is one of the more open and accepting fields of work I can think of.

We have regular meetups where an absolute newbie can meet a very public figure in the community and have a conversation.

We have tutorials all over the internet for anyone. Guides, helpful libraries, etc.

Regardless of age, gender, religion or financial status, programmers welcome you to the community with open arms.

The problem is programmers happen to care a lot about what they do, and that manifests itself in taking a very passionate stance on what seems like trivialities to a passerby.

Take for instance spaces versus tabs for indentation. Pretty inconsequential, right? Visually it looks the same so what's the big deal?

A more experienced programmer can tell you exactly why spaces are better from personal experience. Usually coupled with much emotion too.

It just looks unfriendly / grumpy when she's arguing the merits of spaces over tabs, but I can promise you that it's not her intent to discourage people from programming.

The end goal is always more (and better) programmers. We just have a silly way of unconsciously sabotaging that effort.

> A more experienced programmer can tell you exactly why spaces are better

You're getting in dangerous territory there m8. TABS ftw

Except no editor supports them correctly. Good luck with trying to keep tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment -- at the beginning of the same line.

> Except no editor supports them correctly

I use Acme, an editor that supports them correctly.

And how does it work with this?

  while (keep_going) {
    my_value = function(argument1, argument2, some_module.CONSTANT,
                        some_module.CONSTANT2)
    // ...
  }

Because there is one indent and twenty spaces, and those can't be converted to tabs, since it would break code alignment.

It would say "that's horrible style, keep them all on one line, thanks"

I use proportional fonts so playing games like that is unlikely to get the results one wants.

And I would say "not breaking your lines to fit in 80 columns is horrible style".

Also, proportional fonts are very rare choice for code. You're the first person I've ever heard to use them this way.

I take it that, all in all, Acme doesn't work with tabs correctly for indentation/alignment, the same as the rest of the editors.

The plan9 team use proportional. Plan9 too the decision to drop support of the punch card derived TTY. Once you free yourself from 80 columns you can forget about it. There is no indentation/alignment dichotomy.

Russ Cox, Rob Pike - Acme users

Here's a picture of Dennis Ritchie using it

http://nl.pcmweb.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/sites/default/fi...

Precisely 80 columns may be derived from TTY, but the range 80 was chosen from is not. It's around the limit of a line human can easily comprehend in one look. If you make it 160 (easily doable), then the line gets too wide to read.

Guess why articles in newspapers were typically organized in several narrow columns instead of spanning throughout the whole page, even when the article was several pages long?

And once you forget about the ridiculous idea of having few lines as wide as the whole screen, so there is a small vertical area on the left with almost all the code, while two thirds of the screen is wasted (or so you need to scroll horizontally, which is equally bad), suddenly using proportional fonts goes awry, as you need the alignment, which is a separate thing from indentation.

With a tiling window manager, the window is not the width of the screen.

Acme has no horizontal scrolling.

  while (keep_going) {
  <tab>my_value = function(argument1, argument2, some_module.CONSTANT,
  <tab>                    some_module.CONSTANT2)
  <tab>// ...
  }

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