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Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

Tabs aren't a problem

Spaces aren't a problem.

What is a problem is not picking one or the other. There's arguments for both sides but it is critical to just take a side. I'm sorry your side lost but it makes everything better to just go along with the consensus.

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At one of my internships in the 90's, a developer I worked with solved the problem by never indenting. Every single line of code started at column 1.

It sounds like this is the origin story of Python. Whoever worked with this person made it their life’s mission to enforce proper indentation.

Sounds like you were an indent-ured labourer.

Why even use more than one line?

Why not just make everything whitespace? Give both tabs and spaces their rightful place! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_%28programming_lang...

True, that's how real coders work!

10 IF A=1 OR Z=2 GOTO 30

20 GOTO 50

30 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"

40 GOTO 10

50 GOTO 30

In my PhD on the 90's this is how people were forced to choose with FORTRAN. I chose to code in C and it was painful as well, but less.

I would have given a lot to have the environment people have today to do science.

Why did you leave an empty column at the start? :]

I thought the consensus was tabs for block indentation, spaces for alignment.

No, that's what the tabs hold-outs have morphed into. Which illustrates the problem with tabs: It's very difficult to get everyone on a team to care about tabs or not care about alignment.

i don't take sides, I use tabs AND spaces

"Tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment" is something I wish had caught on.

No, significant whitespace is the problem.

So - you're saying that mixing tabs and spaces in the same file is entirely unproblematic outside of languages with significant whitespace?

Are you sure about that?

mixing tabs and spaces just makes code look bad visually. But when whitespace is significant it can change behaviour.

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