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.
I think calling one way better than the other is flawed. The reason the title is saying that tabs are objectively better is because they are used in addition to where spaces are used elsewhere. You could make the same argument in favor spaces due to keeping things simpler.
The argument of having variable indent size for tabs so viewers can decide how big they are is imho legitimate but also not the goal as it’s addressing something that teams generally agree on. There is max characters per line, brace placement, general code style and rules. Yes we can eject the indentation from the rules that are agreed on but once again simplicity over complexity has an equal say.
In the end it doesn’t matter that much, a good programmer will be able to work in either setting, the Editor will do most of the work anyways.
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I think calling one way better than the other is flawed. The reason the title is saying that tabs are objectively better is because they are used in addition to where spaces are used elsewhere. You could make the same argument in favor spaces due to keeping things simpler.
The argument of having variable indent size for tabs so viewers can decide how big they are is imho legitimate but also not the goal as it’s addressing something that teams generally agree on. There is max characters per line, brace placement, general code style and rules. Yes we can eject the indentation from the rules that are agreed on but once again simplicity over complexity has an equal say.
In the end it doesn’t matter that much, a good programmer will be able to work in either setting, the Editor will do most of the work anyways.
With all that said, spaces all the way!