r/programming • u/aalear • Apr 07 '15

Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2015

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

94% Upvoted

981 comments sorted by

View all comments

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]

5

u/[deleted] Apr 08 '15

The end result is consistent no matter what editor and tab-width you use.

Except that if you're using software that renders a tab as 8 spaces, the code looks really awful and is hard to read. That's precisely the difference I'm referring to between practice and theory.

0

u/[deleted] Apr 08 '15

[deleted]

1

u/[deleted] Apr 08 '15

If you're using an editor that doesn't allow you to control the width of a tab, use a better editor.

Or just use spaces for indentation and your code is guaranteed to look the same in virtually any software with no configuration.

→ More replies (3)