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There are some good reason for using spaces instead of tabs and good reasons but I'm sure it's mostly just a uniform. It's now a cultural meme that spaces is better, and people who are exposed to this meme tend to be more connected to the higher end of the community than people who aren't. It's like the correlation of people who curse making lower salary and people who wear suits making higher salary.

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Silicon Valley on HBO actually made the opposite conclusion, that tabs are better (Richard did not hire someone because they used spaces). The main point being pressing space bar 4, 8, 12 times etc is a waste of time

I think it also shows where a lot of people get confused, that being in the "spaces" camp doesn't necessarily mean you are pressing the space bar each time

I think his argument was also that spaces would take up 4 characters, whereas a tab would take up 1. As a compression company, it "only made sense for him to choose the lower character count".

For the sake of argument: "As a compression company", isn't data redundancy exactly what they're supposed to handle?

You still press tab on the keyboard and your IDE would render it as spaces. Whichever writer made such a strange statement is decidedly in the lower end of the community.

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