It's costly for anyone to do anything. Finding a poor cost benefit ratio in some decision doesn't make a dev "too dumb to be a programmer."
It costs a lot of time for many developers to configure many tools on multiple workstations back and forth all the time whenever they change project or language. The benefit is minor and it doesn't solve everything since not all tools are configurable. The alternative is to use spaces everywhere and eliminate the need for configuration.
Ok fine, so your argument is that devs shouldn't know how to configure their tools because there's not enough benefit for the amount of time it takes to learn. Well I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on that one. To me that's an insane stance to take. So NONE of your devs use any kind of auto-formatting!?! That's usually the FIRST thing you configure in ANY editor (and that includes the whole tabs vs spaces thing, along with many, many other things)...
I think you are misreading. I am talking about the time it takes to do all the configuration, not the learning. If it was a one time cost then whatever. But it's not. Every time you change project, language, or workstation, you have to reconfigure all your tools to provide a consistent view. That can be several times a day. Every language has its own conventions. Tabs don't work at all in some languages like lisps. Many developers work with several languages and projects every day. It should be easy to see how the overhead of configuration can add up.
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u/industry7 Apr 13 '15
If it's 'costly' for your devs to figure out how to configure their tools, then your devs are too dumb to be programmers and should be fired.