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According to Statistics, Programming with Spaces Instead of Tabs Makes You Richer

posted by n1 on Sunday June 18 2017, @12:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the not-your-bar-tab dept.

MrPlow writes:

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

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  • (Score: 2) by vux984 on Monday June 19 2017, @05:51AM

    by vux984 (5045) on Monday June 19 2017, @05:51AM (#527753)

    As are tabs.

    LMAO. Can you really say that with a straight face? Tabs are not well defined; editors treat them differently, and they are highly configurable;... that's the opposite of 'simple, well defined, and portable'. How much special programming in the editor is required to handle spaces? About the same amount as the letter 'A'... which is to say none. How custom logic to handle tabs? Tabs are pretty much the LEAST simple character used in source code.

    Only when using a mono-spaced font.

    That's true. Does anybody use proportional space font for source code?

    Sometimes. But no-one's suggesting destroying the Space Bar.

    The post i was responding too was.

    Not really. You could define a tab as a different number of spaces in your editor.

    The context here was someone saying not to use spaces ever, only tabs. Defining a tab as a different number of spaces, requires you to use spaces.

    Spaces potentially allow more inconsistency than tabs when used for code indentation.

    The code you are pasting in from another developer somwhere else, could potentially use spaces OR tabs OR both. Only the possibility of there being spaces is not going to result in 'more inconsistency' ... at worst it'll be the same.

    Sure, you can but it becomes irritatingly inconsistent the minute you have to bring in code from another project or programmer that just happens to use a different number of spaces to you to represent an indentation. Spaces potentially allow more inconsistency than tabs when used for code indentation.

    Decent editors can reformat code on demand. Except for python.

    Also, if you indent with spaces, some simple editors..[...]

    Don't use crappy editors. Some crappy editors won't cope with CR/LF issues, or unicode... either.

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