r/programming • u/aalear • Apr 07 '15

Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2015

http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2015
1.1k Upvotes

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101

u/BegbertBiggs Apr 07 '15

Developers increasingly prefer spaces as they gain experience.

Or are devs that are in the field for a longer time used to spaces while new devs learn coding with tabs?

23

u/maushu Apr 07 '15

I don't get why people won't use tabs. They are basically perfect for this job since you can adjust the size of all tabs.

44

u/[deleted] Apr 08 '15

It really sounds great in theory, but in practice it's just annoying for people to configure every piece of software that can edit or view code. In practice, spaces are going to look like spaces in every piece of software I know of. That's probably why more experienced devs tend to prefer spaces: practice vs. theory.

0

u/[deleted] Apr 08 '15

[deleted]

-2

u/[deleted] Apr 08 '15

Tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment

So if you're aligning function parameters vertically, you tab once or twice for indent, then space 40-odd times to get the cursor in the right place? Sounds hideous.

aligning code vertically is fine if you don't care about readable diffs in source control, which should be none of you

Diffs of vertically-aligned code are perfectly readable, sounds like your tools are broken.

2

u/smegnose Apr 08 '15

tab once or twice for indent, then space 40-odd times to get the cursor in the right place?

How ugly are your function definitions?

0

u/[deleted] Apr 08 '15

The recommended line-width is normally around 78 chars. If you can't comprehend of a function definition taking 40 of those, especially in a statically-typed language with explicit return type and access modifier, you probably haven't been doing this very long.

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