I hope we're nearing the end of the era where we're editing text in a bubble of tooling that understands ASTs but has to map everything back to text.
I look forward making tabs vs spaces a viewer setting and not an author choice.
I look forward making tabs vs spaces a viewer setting and not an author choice.
Unfortunately, though, everyone who has used tabs got bitten by stupid text editors that don't make it obvious whether you've used a tab or a space and substitute a tab for any run of 8 spaces. So if you're aligning an argument list you'll get a mixture of tabs and spaces. Everyone got bitten by this once back in the day then switched tabs off forever. They then switched tabs off in the text editors that the next generation are using.
I'm more than happy to let something like Black handle formatting for me, though. Sure, there are some occasions where my own formatting would have been better, but the benefits far outweigh the (very small) costs here.
The silly thing is with tools like Black etc. it should be possible to use tabs again. If the only reason against tabs is people fuck it up, there's really no reason to use spaces in an auto-formatted project.
> This is indentation whitespace, display it how you like
It should be
> This is a function body, display it how you like
Not only should readers be able to differ about how much whitespace is shown. They should be able to differ about whether it's whitespace that is used at all. Maybe they want something crazy like it makes a different kind if sound when you look at it, or appears in a different color or font. Whatever it is, it's no business of whoever is writing the program--they ought to be able to have an entirely different experience while still kicking out the same program.
It's just the lowest common denominator, and it will always be that. Revision control tools, editors, compilers, the entire world is built around this. And there's no single alternative that could take its place.
The reality is that systems like a Smalltalk image or stored procedures in a database, or a fancy IDE, or whatever are just going to have to bundle tools for good interop with filesystems at that level, and that's just how it goes.
In the end what we have in text files is a mediocre, but universal, interop system.
But then we'll just have AST vs tabs & spaces. A layer down, tabs already should've solved 2 vs 4 vs 8 vs whatever spaces by making the semantic separation a single character, and the representation of it an author choice.