Hacker News Reader

>Are you serious? Would you put tabs in source code too?

Of course. Why the fuck wouldn't I put tabs in source code?

We INDENT the code pressing tab. We don't press 4 spaces. Why shouldn't the code reflect that? And tabs are symbolic (logical entities), so they are customizable.

You suggest we'd rather use the elaborate kludges to handle spaces as tabs in the editor? What year is this? 1978?

Because tabs are a pain in the arse when you open them in a different editor and neat code suddenly becomes unreadable as the indentation gets messed up.

Most editors have a "tab button prints spaces" option that isn't too difficult to find. (Plenty of them have a format code option as well, so it isn't such a big deal, but overall I find it easier just to switch everything to spaces.)

>Because tabs are a pain in the arse when you open them in a different editor and neat code suddenly becomes unreadable as the indentation gets messed up.

I never had that experience, and I've used Vim, Eclipse, ST3, TextMate and BBEdit. How does that ever happen?

A tab is a tab, no matter the editor. One might be set to show it as 8 chars wide or 4 chars wide etc (since it's a logical unit), but no indentation gets "messed up".

If by identation you mean: "variables arranged to start at the same point because the programmer has OCD", maybe. But no declarations or indentation that matters, like braces etc ever changes.

>Most editors have a "tab button prints spaces" option

Yes. The back-to-the-seventies elaborate kludge I've already mentioned. It's 2014.

It happens when you open up code written by others. That's when I usually see it.

In that case you would have to set your editor to display 8 spaces per tab, or 4 or whatever the code editor where the code was written was using. I don't see that being any less of a kludge than changing it to do spaces when a tab is pressed.

I have given you a reason why I prefer spaces over tabs. Your reasoning seems to be "because I can". Then start harping back to the 70's despite that part of your comment being irrelevant.

Is there an actual reason you prefer tabs over spaces, given that you can't visually tell the difference most of the time?

Also as I mainly use Python, it is the preferred way to indent.

http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#tabs-or-spaces

"spaces are the preferred whitespace marker for 99% of programmers."

99% of which programmers?

The Linux Kernel uses tabs for indenting

Well, I use spaces for marking whitespace in many cases. Just not for indenting, that's what tabs are for :).

I think you might overstate the percentage here, but I think the overall sentiment is true. But I've always thought a better approach would be to ban combining leading tabs with leading spaces at the file level and leaving the choice up to the user beyond that. I believe python3 actually takes this approach.

But I am glad that YAML made any choice at all. Allowing mixing is absolutely the worst possible option.

ahem

http://www.emacswiki.org/SmartTabs

It's a lovely theory, but put into practice it's a lot of work to maintain, especially with more than one editor. I was a proponent of this concept for a long time, but it's just not worth it [1]. If you want to be able to align the leading edge to something other than a tab stop you are better off from a practical perspective to just enforce the use of spaces.

[1] Think in particular of when code moves around. Sometimes it moves to a place where the indent level is different but the total number of expanded spaces is the same. This looks fine until you look in another editor.

Just use a capable editor. It's 2014, for heaven's sake!

The problem occurs when you are SSH'ed to a machine you are setting up, or one that is customer owned, you use whatever editor is around to make a quick edit, not realising that the file labeled .conf is actually a YAML file, you hit tab because it makes logical sense and then shit breaks.

No thanks, YAML is a terrible choice for configuration files.

All YAML files are required to begin with "---". If you're aware of what YAML is, and you've seen YAML ebfore, and yet you somehow "aren't aware" that something is a YAML file, you're incompetent.

There is no requirement for a YAML file to begin with "---".

Look at the database.yml files that come with Rails applications, or look at the +MANIFEST file that pkgng requires on FreeBSD.

Those are yaml files, no triple dashes.

Calling me incompetent isn't helping your case either.

If you're connecting to a machine over SSH and you're making enough changes that it's going to be difficult to maintain an indentation scheme, open it up on a local editor with SFTP. Emacs supports it out of the box, and Sublime has an excellent nagware SFTP package in the standard repos.

>Sometimes it moves to a place where the indent level is different but the total number of expanded spaces is the same.

This is exactly why Smart Tabs is the only intelligent way to do it - if you change the width of a tab, everything resizes instantly to match the current user's aesthetics, but things that need to be aligned stay aligned. The only case in which it breaks is if you switch to a non-monospaced font, and in that case, God help you.

Which is precisely why tabs-only is a problem: tabs cannot express character-granularity alignment, so you HAVE to mix them with spaces in this way. (Or give up pretty alignment in favor of fixed indentation for continued expressions, which I'm not willing.)

Spaces just get out of my way.

P.S. I'm undoubtly biased by Python. The community's agreement on spaces and specifically 4 spaces has been a pure blessing.

Because not every editor I use will automatically turn the tab into spaces. This is especially a problem when I am editing a YAML file over SSH using vi or nano, or pico or thousands of other editors.

They stick the damn tab in, then the program that is parsing said YAML file does the wrong thing and I am confused, annoyed, and most times really pissed off because I will spend hours trying to figure out what went wrong.

YAML is stupid for configuration files.

Tabs vs. spaces... in some respects programming is so incredibly primitive.

So are "seeing" and "hearing".

I for one am looking forward to the time when neural implants will translate my high level programming thoughts into microcode sent directly to the CPU for execution.