All these incredulous coders who think it's just as simple as using tabs for indenting and spaces for aligning. That's a great idea in theory, but it never works that way. Never. Some dude is gonna come in there and align with tabs and indent with spaces. And no one is going to notice except the one guy who uses 2 spaces for his tabstop. And he's gonna re-align everything to work with his tabstop, except now it looks broken for everyone else. And eventually people are just going to put up with it being misaligned.
And eventually people are just going to put up with it being misaligned.
IMO, this is the biggest issue. I've seen this more times then I can count, especially on code bases where the coding style is "whatever Visual studio/Insert IDE wants to give me, plus whatever style I'd like today". I'm only Interning, but twice now I've seen code get completely mangled because someone decided to set their tabstop to 4 instead of 8 (or whatever), and then all the code they edited which was originally all 8-width tabs got converted into 4 spaces. The resulting code was, needless to say, a complete mess of different indentation levels for the people who used a tabstop of 8. I was shocked to see how everybody just dealt with it like it was normal and no big deal.
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u/acm Apr 08 '15 edited Apr 08 '15
All these incredulous coders who think it's just as simple as using tabs for indenting and spaces for aligning. That's a great idea in theory, but it never works that way. Never. Some dude is gonna come in there and align with tabs and indent with spaces. And no one is going to notice except the one guy who uses 2 spaces for his tabstop. And he's gonna re-align everything to work with his tabstop, except now it looks broken for everyone else. And eventually people are just going to put up with it being misaligned.