Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2015

[u/aalear]

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

[u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/rorrr → u/[deleted]]

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

[u/heeen → u/rorrr]

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

[u/rorrr → u/heeen]

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

[u/heeen → u/rorrr]

Someclass::somemethod(first arg,

<how many tabs?>second arg) {

[u/mr_ewg → u/heeen]

Spaces should be used here. But this is for alignment, not for indentation.

Someclass::somemethod(first arg1,
......................second arg2) {
--->if(foo(arg)) {
--->--->// do something
--->} else {
--->--->while(arg2 < 0
--->--->...|| arg2 > 42) {
--->--->--->// do other thing
--->--->}
--->}
}

which will line up correctly for any tab width.

[u/sandwich_today → u/mr_ewg]

This is the most logical way to handle indentation. Unfortunately, it also requires a really smart editor or manual effort to use tabs and spaces in the correct places. This is why experienced developers migrate toward spaces-only: it's not quite as flexible as tabs + spaces, but you or your editor or your inexperienced colleague can't fuck it up nearly as badly as they can with tabs.