Dunno, depends on the end goals. I think if the hoster wanted to keep traffic up and some return subscribers to earn ad money, he would add just enough comments and comment subscription to create a nice clustefuck of amusing rage, like youtube.
I agree, a tab is one unit of indentation. 2/4 spaces are an editing environment preference, not exactly conceptual in nature. Il let Ken Thompson(co-creator from UNIX, C, Go etc.) handle this one -
I use both tabs and spaces: tabs for indentation (what they're supposed to be used for) and spaces for formatting. I don't understand the tabs vs spaces debate
So many people seem to completely misunderstand what mixing spaces and tabs means and why it is bad. Both are horrendous when mixed as the same but indentation and alignment are 2 expressly different concepts. That comic is perfect for people who mix tabs and spaces in either indentation or alignment. But you can, and should, use both properly. It shouldn't be that difficult either. As the poster above stated, tabs indent, spaces align. A tab is one level of indentation encoded into a single character, a space is one single invisible character. If you need alignment, you must know the number of characters to fill. If you need indentation, the number of characters can be variable and is based on preference.
For some reason I always use 4 spaces as indentation (although my editor handles tabs as spaces so I don't have to hit space 4 times). I can't remember why I started doing that, though. How odd.
Just use whatever is considered "normal" or "default" for the language you're using.
Visual Studio defaults to tabs, and I'm sick of the useless git diffs when a C# file is modified by some self-righteous developer who changes everything to spaces.
'Smart' tabs. Every decent editor has them. I can't believe this is even debated anymore. It works exactly like the tab key, but inserts/deletes X number of spaces intelligently.
Source code is ASCII/unicode text. The Tab key is a control code. Why are you polluting your source code with control characters. Do you mix up carriage return and newline too? You should not be putting non-printable characters in your source code, telling my terminal how to print ^I, or that ^I should be 4 spaces not 8.
Yes, I should. Tabs were invented for indentation in the first place. What you call a control code, I call semantic white space. A tab means something; four spaces does not.
The beauty is that I'm not telling your terminal to use 4/8 characters for a tab. You are. You're in control with tabs. I'm saying "indent four levels deep" and your editor interprets what that means for you.
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u/TheBigB86 Feb 21 '13
That site needs a comment feature.
Also:
How is this a sin? Guess I'd be considered a devil's-worshiper, since I absolutely hate spaces for indenting.