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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: 4, Insightful) by Arik on Sunday June 18 2017, @08:20AM (5 children)
I was wondering if you had ever seen a typewriter, thanks for confirming the no.
Of course tabs have adjustable width. Typewriters had these things called tab stops, you can move them right or left any way you needed to get your indentation levels correct. This is even easier to do with a modern text editor. Even freaking Word lets you set tab stops.
Spaces are for separating words. Tabs are for indentation. Just because neither of these things deposits ink on the paper does not make them the exact same thing.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 18 2017, @08:54AM (4 children)
What editors do you know that allow for arbitrary tab stops? The only one I know that actually allows that is Emacs, all others only allow to set a tab interval, not every tab stop individually. And please do mention code editors -- Word is not a code editor (and it knows that -- even if you edit VB macros in Word itself, it spawns a different editor).
(Score: 2) by rleigh on Sunday June 18 2017, @10:21AM (2 children)
Tab stop settings are a property of the output device, i.e. the terminal emulator or printer, just like physical stops on a typewriter. Some provide escape sequences to set them, others have configuration settings on their setup screen, some are fixed. When using an editor on these, they should use the terminal settings, unless they ignore them and fake it with spaces or direct positioning escapes.
Graphical editors worth their salt allow flexible configuration also, some are limited to multiples of a number, others are fixed.
I ended up moving to spaces, in practice it's less problematic when working on a shared codebase with others.
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Monday June 19 2017, @06:15AM (1 child)
1. Who prints source code these days?
2. The width of a space is also a property of the output device.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday June 19 2017, @07:18PM
Output devices include monitors and screen readers, so the answer is anyone that reads it.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by Arik on Sunday June 18 2017, @02:28PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?