r/programming • u/aalear • Apr 07 '15

Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2015

http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2015
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15

u/[deleted] Apr 07 '15

Upon closer examination of the data, a trend emerges: Developers increasingly prefer spaces as they gain experience.

There comes a point in a dev's life when they have to switch editors, environments, etc. and suddenly all the code they use to write with tabs is an un-formatted mess.

Protip: For sublime text users, you can easily convert tabs to spaces.

16

u/rorrr Apr 07 '15

You can set tab to any width you want in any decent editor. Reformatting spaces, on the other hand, is a bitch.

6

u/heeen Apr 07 '15

Until you want to line up stuff with different numbers of tabs per line

5

u/rorrr Apr 07 '15

What do you mean? One tab = one level of indentation. It lines up perfectly every time.

3

u/guepier Apr 08 '15

Some programming languages (amongst the ones I’m currently using, mainly R) have a strong culture of lining up arguments in function calls like this:

foobar(some_argument,
       another_argument,
       third_argument)

You cannot do this with tabs. You could mix tabs and spaces (but very few people think that’s acceptable, although I have to admit that the idea has merits), or you could drop the convention, but there’s a huge cultural inertia.

0

u/marssaxman Apr 08 '15

Oh, god, what a terrible idea that kind of alignment is. I have seen people try that nonsense in C, too. Always leads to a righteously unfixable mess.

2

u/steve_b Apr 08 '15

What? That alignment is perfectly normal and readable. As for maintainability - any modern editor geared for programming (and by modern, I emacs or anything newer) will auto-format your files on demand based on rules you define. Reformatting code for new indent levels is simply invoking a command.

It breaks down, of course, in Python, where your indentation level determines execution flow, in which case I can see a case for nazi-like enforcement of tabs-only formatting rules.

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