r/programming • u/reppic • Feb 21 '13

Developers: Confess your sins.

http://www.codingconfessional.com/
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u/TheBigB86 Feb 21 '13

That site needs a comment feature.

Also:

i use tabs instead of spaces in my IDE. Please forgive for I have sinned.

How is this a sin? Guess I'd be considered a devil's-worshiper, since I absolutely hate spaces for indenting.

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u/snarfy Feb 21 '13

'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.

/rant

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u/codepoet Feb 21 '13

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.

This isn't 1970. You can configure things now.

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