Exactly.
Indentation != spacing.
And thats all the argument i need. I dont understand why people argue with consistent text layout for all-spaces. You can use tabs to indent and spaces to align after that, in most cases.
Indentation != spacing.
And thats all the argument i need. I dont understand why people argue with consistent text layout for all-spaces. You can use tabs to indent and spaces to align after that, in most cases.
In practice this is difficult; since the characters are invisible by default, people will inevitably mix up the two. Looks like the industry standard is to give up and use spaces everywhere, unless strict and mandatory tooling exists.
But the new problem is linters and formatters don't understand alignment, so they always want those extra spaces removed, making a mess.
I’m not sure what are you referring to, could you give an example?
What? Well aligning e.g. a long SQL statement is asinine and does not improve readability??
perhaps the issue is the specific choice of fonts. the author in that article exclaims that if you allow proportional fonts then any font can be a programming font, while the author of the following post claims otherwise and set out to make their own proportional font that is suitable: https://timgord.com/2024-01/lisnoti-a-proportional-font-that... . there are other such projects like https://input.djr.com/info/ and https://go.dev/blog/go-fonts
one issue is that of distinguishing similar characters, which the above projects try to address while some people claim it's not an issue at all: https://alexkutas.com/posts/non-monospace-font
there is also the issue of alignment mentioned in the first article, that could possibly be addressed by limiting character widths to multiples of the smallest width.
but there is still the issue of interacting with other programmers, mentioned in this article: https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2021/09/12/proportional-fon... we would all have to agree on the same font if there is any kind of alignment needed apart from indentation. right now we can say that you can choose any monospace font, and things will look as intended, but with a proportional font things will look different depending on the font choice. whether that is an issue or not needs further study i think.
more discussion of pros and cons can be found here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/218623/why-use-monospace...
"Distinguishing similar characters" is just as much of a concern for me when I'm editing technical documentation as when I'm editing source code. Once again, the Go font has served me well. Previously I used some other humanist style font from from the Ubuntu people that had that classic IBM slash-through zero. Some fonts have overly-aggressive ligatures and such, but those fonts should not be used in any technical context, source code is not special.
Alignment is a non-issue because wanting alignment is bad. There, solved that ;-) Arbitrary diff noise over multiple lines because you added one line at the end is a problem, not a goal!
I interact with other programmers just fine. Your linked article seems to be re-engaging in the tabs-vs-spaces flamewar in an era of gofmt rustfmt et al. It's a total non-issue.
Give it two weeks.
Unless you're trying to argue that your code is a tsv file then tabs is the wrong thing to use.
Nobody cares that phone calls happen over fiber now instead of telephone lines. So, same should apply to teletype. Nobody is going to care you're reading this over fiber instead of a telephone line.
Now, people do care if they're trying to read a csv document and somebody didn't quote their commas within strings and now the values are in the wrong columns which could've been avoided by using tabs to store tabular data.
So you're ok if your text editor interprets the LFs of a Unix text file as mere line feeds, without ever going back to the beginning of the lines?