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Comment by deadowl | Hacker News Reader

Maybe if I was using Python or Ruby. But JS? REALLY ugly practice. Multiple blank lines not allowed? I usually go with two to segment heavily procedural code. The most appalling thing by far though is spaces instead of tabs... what's wrong with this guy?

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I am well aware that we are in the minority when it comes to preferring tabs over spaces in JS, but, as useless as this decision is, I will fight over it the street.

It's misplaced passion and I don't care.

I'll join that fight, unless you want you your tabs showing up as two spaces instead of four. Then we'll have to fight after we take down the spacers.

On a slightly more serious note, the benefit of tabs is so clear: everyone can have whatever spacing they want and it doesn't affect anyone else. You just configure your IDE and it looks the way you want it to look. For whatever reason, indenting two spaces makes it hard for me to read code.

I've always found the dislike of tabs to be quite strange. Developers love being explicit and semantic about things, and here we have a character that represents a semantic indent, and there's a huge swath of developers who prefer to go with the airy-fairy presentational space character instead. It even solves the 2-vs-4 debate with allowing each user to render it how they will. Heck, you could even render it as three spaces if you will!

It baffles me. Of course, at the end of the day it's just one IDE setting and I don't have to worry about it (we uses spaces at work and it's fine).

I'm on the fence about this syntax.

    var
        foo = 1,
        foo = 2;

The reason being that things will align whether you use a tabs with a width of 2 or 4.

I also use spaces for mid-line alignment and tabs exclusively for identation. I think this is called "smart tabs"?

I don't really care if people use tabs or spaces as long as the codebase is consistent, but aligning things in the middle of a line is my pet peeve. It's fiddly to maintain, it ruins source control because it requires you to edit many lines when you change one, and worst of all, it makes it impossible to use a proportional typeface.

It's very common to find mixed tabs and spaces where people use tabs. The first sign of this is inconsistent indentation. Maybe they're just sloppy? Oh, hm, here's some more code where it's wildly inconsistent. Time to play guess-the-tab-width until it settles down. Now should I add a comment at the top to tell Emacs about this setting next time I open the file? Probably not, sigh.

Semantic tabs would be good with consistent culture and tooling behind them.

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