Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
The annual Stack Overflow developer surveys often include lots of bad news. "People still use PHP," for example, is a recurring and distressing theme. "Perl exists" is another.
But never before has the survey revealed something as devastatingly terrible as the 2017 survey. Using PHP and Perl are matters of taste. Extremely masochistic taste, certainly, but nobody is wrong for using those languages; it's just the programming equivalent of enjoying Adam Sandler movies. But the 2017 survey goes beyond taste; it goes into deep philosophical questions of right and wrong, and it turns out that being wrong pays more than being right.
Developers who use tabs to indent their code, developers who fight for truth and justice and all that is good in the world, those developers have a median salary of $43,750.
But developers who use spaces to indent their code, developers who side with evil and probably spend all day kicking kittens and punching puppies? Their median salary is $59,140.
Source: ArsTechnica
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Sunday June 18 2017, @01:14AM
No, if everyone used expand tabs things would be groovy. Then it doesn't matter if your tabstops are 2, 3, 4, 8, 92, whatever. Tabs turn into spaces which lets your co-workers can easily figure out your program flow.
Tabs are evil if management doesn't specify tabstops. If management does specify tabstops then tabs are bad.
My ducks are not in a row. I don't know where some of them are, and I'm pretty sure one of them is a turkey.