Hacker News Reader

Comment by fournm | Hacker News Reader

I don't like their indent guidelines, 2 spaces just feels incredibly "cramped" to me with Java. I understand it with an 80 or 100 col line limit (I also tend to 120, but 100's okay), but really, that's the only thing. I personally agree with most of this and we have warnings generated on commit (thanks Sonar!) if people don't follow some of these because they just lead to too many issues down the line that are really easy to accidentally skip over.

I wouldn't imagine it would be too hard to get an IDE auto-formatter to follow all of this (it's more or less what I use with mine, anyways).

View on HN

If they used tabs instead of spaces, it wouldn't be an issue. People could format code on their machine whatever number of columns they prefer. But no... Spaces. Jesus. If you're looking at someone's HTML and it's got this kind of thing strewn about...

  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;

...you know with certainty that you're dealing with either 1) an amateur, or 2) someone constrained by top-down corporate numbnuttery.

The debate over spaces vs. tabs is as old as time. Associating one side of the argument with "top-down corporate numbnuttery" betrays a lack of familiarity with the issue.

The fact is that whatever shop you work at should have an opinion one way or the other, and you should follow it. Programmers will endlessly bikeshed the issue regardless of which style is chosen.

Happily, the Tab-letariat can agree with the Space-eoisie that a separation of the whitespace classes is necessary and good, and any commingling of the two is an affront to God.

Hell, God is an amateur? He should know that tabs indent and spaces align. There's nothing to be confused about.

  is one of those smells except for when it isn't.

    <th>First&nbsp;Name</th>

The above is useful html, but I have had experienced developers "fix" it, thinking it was some copy-paste/dreamweaver accident. Non-Breaking SPaces are useful at times.

We do, in fact, use tabs at work. But I wanted to attempt to avoid starting this war yet again.

Radical idea: lets move code away from the anachronism of flat files. There have been incredible evolution in some areas of development, and other areas time has completely frozen. We should have modern tools from the top-down.

dons flame retardant suit

It's a radical idea that's been tried several times before and never stuck. See: Interlisp, Smalltalk, VisualAge for Java.

I suspect part of the problem is that there is a huge ecosystem of tools that work on plain text, and it's also easy to write more tools that work on plain text. You lose all of that when the database or parse tree is the primary representation, which means that when someone goes to make an adoption decision and their favorite tool doesn't work, they go back to the old way.

Explanation? You could put code elsewhere than in flat files? Elsewhere that is neither VBA nor PLSQL ;)? I'm interested.

Otoh, if you're going to suggest binary structures, I wont be able to approve you if they're not easy to manage in Git.

Roughly it would be some sort of structured text, markup that represents the structure of the code rather than having a flat text file which then requires parsing to reconstruct structure. There are a couple of motivations here: structured representation allows editors to much more freely handle custom visual representations. Debates about tabs, spaces, braces, semicolons, parenthesis, etc etc are painfully outdated. These simply become properties of your chosen visual representation. It also allows more meaningful transforms without requiring a compilation pass, as a meaningful intermediate language is already present. This would have a few benefits: semantic text highlighting, straightforward semantic changeset merging, enhanced error highlighting and more semantic error detection (if I insert a line of code somewhere, the error is readily marked as the inserted line as the surrounding code is still semantically valid), sharing the semantic representation between IDE plugins. I'm sure this is just scratching the surface.

I'm reminded of the project I recall reading about from steve yeggie regarding a language agnostic IDE framework (whatever happened to that anyways?). A language agnostic, semantically rich file format would allow entire classes of transforms to apply across all languages that could be marked up by the language agnostic file format.

There are so many possibilities here, and yet a non-trivial amount of programmers are still anchored by the supposed benefits of editing code from the console! Programmers should be the first to be looking forward rather than being tied down to the past.

I thought you were going to suggest something crazy and imaginative issued from Big Data, like introduce some concept of Big Code, where you'd map-reduce your execution path, have non-consistent executions spread over thousands of servers, with the explicit target of singularity ;)

The option you suggest could have been done since long and it hasn't: I'm inclined to wonder why. Probably text-file editing has reached the good-enough level where we've got enough tooling to cope with the drawbacks, and the basics of open source is, it has to be the most urgent solution for the one who takes the initiative.

I used IBM's VisualAge for Java for a while back in the day, which was essentially applying a Smalltalk model of code organization to Java, but I never liked the image system. There's just something wonderful to me about being able to use a bunch of command line tools to perform ad hoc code analysis on files.

Indent size is definitely a personal preference; I started out with 8, then shortly went to 4, moved down to 3 for a very short time followed by 2, and have now settled on one space. One nice side-effect is that I can glance at the column counter and see the indent level immediately, and the closing braces look like a diagonal line which makes a missing/extra one quite easy to spot:

      }
     }
    }

The nice thing about C-syntax languages is they can be automatically formatted, so anyone who finds my indents to be too small can increase them, and vice-versa,

You should see how two-space indents look in a proportional font! It's a sorry sight.

That's the real shame of two-space indents. They basically require that all developers use monospaced fonts in their editors.

One of my most core principles for coding style is that the code should be equally readable in a proportional font or a monospaced font.

Why is that a core principle for me? Because I like proportional fonts. I don't use less-readable monospaced fonts when I write; I don't know why I should have to use them when I code.

You can't achieve this with two-space indents. When you view the code in a proportional font, it looks like one-space indentation.

For me, a proportional font is so much more readable, and lets me see so much more code at once, that I'm bummed that so many popular coding styles use conventions that only work monospaced.

To their credit, this coding standard actively discourages "column alignment". Abandoning column alignment is a wonderful thing: it gets you most of the way there toward having code that's perfectly readable in a proportional font.

It's unfortunate that they throw this benefit away by mandating two-space indents.

> Why is that a core principle for me? Because I like proportional fonts. I don't use less-readable monospaced fonts when I write; I don't know why I should have to use them when I code.

I had a phase like that about 15 years ago. In the end I just felt that it wasn't worth it. Whenever I looked at other peoples code through the lens of a proportional font, it would look awkward. Any attempt on the authors part of lining things up would just make things worse.

It turns out that proportional fonts are designed for text, not code.

That 15-year-ago mark is interesting to me, because that was just about the time when I switched to proportional fonts.

I recognize that I'm in a tiny minority: the vast majority of developers code in monospaced fonts.

That's one reason why I value an editor that makes it easy to switch between a proportional font and monospaced, so I can code in the font I like or switch to a monospaced font when necessary. One of the few that does this well is Komodo, where each "theme" includes both proportional and monospaced fonts, and you can easily switch between them. (I just wish IntelliJ IDEA did this!)

It's also why I wouldn't presume to use a coding standard that worked only in a proportional font but looked bad in monospaced.

But to my eyes, a coding standard that works equally well in proportional and monospaced fonts is superior to one that works only in monospaced.

I must respectfully disagree that "It turns out that proportional fonts are designed for text, not code." All of the code I've written in the last 10-15 years is just as readable in a proportional font or monospaced. It really makes no difference at all which kind of font you read the code in, if the coding standard was designed to support both.

I'll have to respectfully disagree as well :-)

Fonts designed for programming typically take extra care of making sure that certain groups of glyphs look different: "O0" and "1lI" for example.

Now I'm curious: what proportional fonts do you use for coding?

Sorry for the slow reply. In case you read this later, my favorite coding font is actually Georgia.

It's not perfect; Georgia's lowercase o looks a lot like 0. But in practice that has never been a problem for me. And unlike many proportional fonts which have monospaced numbers, even the numbers are proportional in Georgia.

But I just like the way it looks and the readability it has - for my eyes.

What are you doing that ASCII art is a major factor in code readability?

Never said it was.

I spend a lot of time reading code. I read other peoples code every day. To a very large extent, that code is going to use various layout tricks that are based on a monospaced font. Someone might line comments up like this:

    // 1. Blah blah, blah
    //    blah and more blah.
    // 2. Second piece of blah.

Arguments to a function might be lined up:

    void func(int arg1,
              int arg2...

Someone might describe some detail of a network protocol with a diagram (as often seen in RFCs). A large comment block might be adjusted to fill out to a certain column width. I'm probably forgetting a ton of other layout tricks that people use. Almost all of them rely on a monospace font.

Looking at code that wasn't specifically written for proportional fonts is death by a thousand cuts. The readability suffers greatly.

This reminds me of some people who try to do ASCII art in a proportional font in a plaintext email, which then looks completely munged on everyone who uses monospace fonts or a different proportional font. IMHO plain text files should always be read/written in a monospace font, as otherwise you limit the expression of the medium unnecessarily since ASCII art becomes no longer "portable".

If your blocks are so long and nested that you are worried about losing track of indent level, your blocks are too long and nested.

I actually write very short functions and blocks of code with very little nesting. So that isn't the problem.

The problem for me is simply that a two-space indent looks like one space in a proportional font, and that makes it pretty hard to follow even one or two levels of indentation.

(And apologies for not replying sooner!)

I use 2 space indent with Segoe UI and am pretty happy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com