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Comment by wernercd | Hacker News Reader

You don't expect factions? Religious wars have been raged over tabs vs spaces... tab is 2, 3 or 4 spaces... bracket on this line vs the next...

Factions are normal and I would expect them to coalesce, polarize and get more extreme over time.

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Okay, I understand the reasoning for most of these choices, but what kind of barbarian argues that a tab should be 3 spaces?

I believe that was the standard at Google for a while?

Auuugh that'd drive me insane

Ahh, fighting. The ultimate form of togetherness.

I don't get that war - configure your editor to convert your tabs to spaces. Precision.

Ah, but then you commit and someone else pulls the source code down and their carefully crafted N space per tab setting is now worthless since you decided how long tabs should be for them.

Then they post an angry rant on some mailing list about how forcing tabs to spaces forces people with various reading disabilities into a tabstop setting that makes it hard to read.

And before too long it's devolved into the same old Tabs vs Spaces debate.

But... your team just enforces a style. No debate. Two spaces for Ruby I've seen almost everywhere. Two for Elixir, same. Go has go fmt. This hypothetical of different spaces is killed before it happens.

Having a style ends the debate yes. Configuring your editor to automatically replace tabs with spaces does not end the debate. It starts it.

Before that, your diff looks ugly and you generate tons of merge conflicts by useless indentation changes.

You mean convert spaces to tabs, right? ...right?!

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