Yesterday, I shared some spicy takes. A few were particularly controversial—most notably, that I correct Gif the correct way (with a soft G)—but I also got a lot of emails asking me to elaborate on a few of them.
Today, I wanted to talk about how tabs are objectively better than spaces. This won’t take long.
Tabs let you define how big you want each indent to be, and spaces do not.
Nah, I’ll keep on sticking with spaces or whatever the language’s formatter uses. Ain’t no way am I mixing tabs and spaces, will just stick with spaces.
I used to be a tabs guy, somepoint over time, especially when I realized some of the edge cases I have in formatting only remain consistent when using spaces, I switched.
Looks like you missed the point. This is about indentation, not formatting.
Use tabs to indent your lines, but if you want to align a parameter with the parenthesis on the line above or something like that, you add spaces after the indentation tabs.
That way if someone wants to they can configure their tab length to 20 spaces and the indentation will remain consistent and the code will remain aligned.
My point was that it’s pretty much impossible to indent with tabs in lisp. It’ll be harder to read and scan for everyone else who has a different tab with. How you indent and what you want to indent to is very different compared to a c-style language.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !programming@programming.dev
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person’s post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you’re posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don’t want to watch videos
laughs in lisp
Nah, I’ll keep on sticking with spaces or whatever the language’s formatter uses. Ain’t no way am I mixing tabs and spaces, will just stick with spaces.
I used to be a tabs guy, somepoint over time, especially when I realized some of the edge cases I have in formatting only remain consistent when using spaces, I switched.
Looks like you missed the point. This is about indentation, not formatting.
Use tabs to indent your lines, but if you want to align a parameter with the parenthesis on the line above or something like that, you add spaces after the indentation tabs.
That way if someone wants to they can configure their tab length to 20 spaces and the indentation will remain consistent and the code will remain aligned.
My point was that it’s pretty much impossible to indent with tabs in lisp. It’ll be harder to read and scan for everyone else who has a different tab with. How you indent and what you want to indent to is very different compared to a c-style language.