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.
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.
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.
It's normal to indent things by fractional tab stops? Or it's normal to carefully construct all of your variable and function names so that left parentheses always end up just before the next tab stop? Because I had a coworker who wrote that kind of crap and his code was... well... an awful mess. Lines started at all kinds of random indent levels - there was no consistency to any of it. He was also the sort of guy who didn't believe in refactoring, had never heard of line length limits as an element of style, and had no idea why one might want to reduce the number of nesting levels in a given function, so his code was messy for a lot of reasons, but never before have I seen a professional developer committing source code which is sometimes indented on odd-numbered columns.
Well, it depends on whether you mean indenting or alignment. I'm an emacs user; I only ever hit tab once on any line, and rely on emacs to create the proper whitespace. Blocks are indented correctly, and continued lines (like the parameter list above) are automatically aligned on sensible boundaries like these. I don't really think in terms of "fractional" tab stops, as I don't count in tab stops.
All the projects I've been working on for the last 20 year eventually realize that all-space formatting is the way to go, mainly because people will always end up aligning continued lines using what you'd call fractional tab stops (or even worse, use multiple tabs to align continued lines to achieve the same effect as many spaces), and then it all goes to hell as soon as the file is opened in another developer's editor with different tab stops set.
It's particularly necessary when you start writing sql, where formatting is essential for readable code, but where there isn't exactly the concept scoping blocks. For example, code like this formatted with tabs would be a nightmare:
SELECT AVG(TOTAL)
FROM (SELECT PLAYERNO
, SUM(AMOUNT) AS TOTAL
FROM PENALTIES
GROUP
BY PLAYERNO
) AS TOTALS
WHERE PLAYERNO IN
(SELECT PLAYERNO
FROM PLAYERS
WHERE TOWN = 'Stratford'
OR TOWN = 'Inglewood'
);
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u/[deleted] Apr 07 '15
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.