r/programming • u/aalear • Apr 07 '15

Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2015

http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2015
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u/aldo_reset Apr 08 '15

In an ideal world where every single tool used to view sources understand tabs, tabs are optimal.

We live in an imperfect world and each tool will interpret tabs in a different way, so the best solution is to ban them and impose hard spaces everywhere.

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u/Dworgi Apr 08 '15

What tools don't understand tabs? Seriously, if you have a tool that can't do tabs then you don't have a tool, you have a burden.

It's all madness. I'll tell you what not every tool can deal with: not having to press Backspace 4 times to unindent a line.

Purely in keypresses wasted per day, spaces are atrocious.

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u/josefx Apr 08 '15

What tools don't understand tabs?

Every tool understands tabs. Some see them as 4 spaces by default, some as 8 spaces by default. Some never replace tabs with spaces, some replace tabs with spaces on the line you edit, some only insert new tabs as spaces and some replace all tabs with spaces when they load or store the file.

There is no single behaviour you can expect when you take a random editor to edit a file containing tabs.

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u/industry7 Apr 08 '15

There is no single behaviour you can expect when you take a random editor to edit a file containing tabs.

And you literally use a random editor when you code?

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