> Why not save even more bytes and re-format the output to single tab indentation?
For your answer search "programmers who use spaces make more money"
For your answer search "programmers who use spaces make more money"
Spaces are simply inferior to tabs since the latter conveys the meaning of "one level of indentation" while the former does not. It's also better for accessibility and file size. There is not one single logical reason to ever use spaces for indentation, not one.
For some very fucking stupid historical reason someone in the 80s made the idiotic decision of spaces being the default in editors and people just went with it. The people earning more are doing so because those are the seniors who have given up on common sense and just go with the flow of the masses who are unable to grasp "tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment" yet insist on keeping alignment so the (terrible) compromise is just using spaces. And I strongly question whether "alignment" is worth anything, in almost all cases it's just useless and in the rest you're drawing ASCII diagrams in the comments which doesn't affect your code at all.
Also see the top answer at https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8tyg4l/why_do_...
I like four character width indentation. Linus prefers eight. With tabs VIM shows me what I like and shows Linus what he likes.
As an interesting note, I now work with the second hard-of-sight developer that I've worked with in my life. They both use normal Jetbrains IDEs, with font sizes and interfaces made huge. Neither of them has ever said a word about my line length. Nor my function length. Nor my long variable and method names. Nor my explicit comments, nor my detailed git commit messages, nor my frequent git commiting, nor my branching preferences, nor my README files, nor my obsessive security practices such as validating types and character length limits on input fields and sanitizing and filtering input and my rejecting of any PR with concatenated outside-data in SQL (even if that outside-data came from the DB itself, for a recent example), and all the other idiosyncrasies that one dev suffers from another.
Line length? Not a problem. Forcing the hard-of-sight dev to indent however _I_ see fit? I wouldn't dream of doing that.
Thing is that with spaces you can also predict consistently the line length and not have code being clipped on someone's screen that set tabs for 8 spaces for some reason.
In any case, I like spaces but I am impartial to either one. You seem like you have very strong opinions about the matter so I won't push the subject further.
> Thing is that with spaces you can also predict consistently the line length and not
> have code being clipped on someone's screen that set tabs for 8 spaces for some reason.
But I'm also the crazy person who uses an 8 wide indent anyway
I’d love to set up terminal tabstop size, textview tabstop size, github tabstop size, IM tabstop size, HN tabstop size, git gui plugin tabstop size, issue tracker tabstop size, tsv file format tabstop size if I used tabs. It makes you so productive.
I think you wrote this the wrong way around?
What I think gp is underestimating is just how much alignment there was in the old days, and how little (compared to now) indentation. From today's perspective, indentation is the norm and alignment is the rare exception. Your question is a good illustration: sounds like you never met alignment, or at least never noticed it. But back then, alignment was a very regular occurrence and the extra diligence required for getting all the tabs and blanks right to look nice on different tab widths, or the ugliness from failing to get the mix right would have been a considerable cost. Avoiding unpredictably wide tabs was a reasonable call.
This is the exact reason that crime statistics are so crummy, even from anonymous surveys. Very few are compelled to admit to a crime that they haven't been convicted of (and some won't even to admit to that). Or why post-sale NPS scores have a negative bent - you're more likely to respond if you have a complaint.