
John le Carre finally publishes the story of his own eventful life.The Raspberry Pi celebrates its 10 millionth sale.Amazon wants to invade your neighborhood shopping mall - and your home!.America appoints its first federal chief information security officer.NASA shares some spectacular images from Mars.Stanford scientists build a way to type with no hands by reading brain signals.“That said, only a moron would use tabs to format their code.” WebReduce

What does matter is that you, and everyone else on your team, sticks with those conventions and uses them consistently.” But he couldn’t resist adding one more sentence. Back in 2009, he wrote “It doesn’t actually matter which coding styles you pick. “Of course, consistency matters more than either one, and a good IDE makes the differences negligible.” But why spoil a good argument? “That said, the point of this thread is to be a holy war, so…”Īnd Jeff Atwood himself seems to agree - to a point.
#Sql tabs to sapces code
They allow developers with different preferences in indentation size to change how the code looks without changing the code”īut the tabs part of the page ultimately strikes a conciliatory note. “They’re a character specifically meant for indentation. “A tab could be a different number of columns depending on your environment, but a space is always one column.” Within reason of course - when done openly, in a fair and consensus building way, and without stabbing your teammates in the face along the way.”įour years later, the question turned up in the heart of geek nation - in a discussion on Stack Overflow. “So yes,” Atwood concludes, “absurd as it may sound, fighting over whitespace characters and other seemingly trivial issues of code layout is actually justified. If the rules are violated, then the utility afforded by the expectations that programmers have built up over time is effectively nullified.”Īnd Atwood cites more experiments - one from the early 1970s - which found that information is retained better when it’s arranged in a meaningful order. “Our studies support the claim that knowledge of programming plans and rules of programming discourse can have a significant impact on program comprehension… It is not merely a matter of aesthetics that programs should be written in a particular style… programmers have strong expectations that other programmers will follow these discourse rules. He lobbies for his position by citing the beloved 1984 book Code Complete. In 2009, Jeff Atwood, one of the co-founders of Stack Overflow, wrote a blog post called Death to the Space Infidels!. Merrily we rolled along, and in 2004, a post on the Microsoft Developer Network took up the very same issue, noting that some people combine spaces and tabs, and arguing that they’ve actually staked out a fourth position: coding tools should be configurable to display each user’s preferred view, while saving code in accordance with an agreed-upon set of rules.
#Sql tabs to sapces how to
His post explained how to configure two Linux text editors (Emacs and Vi) to change the tabs to various widths. It was already being described as an “interminable argument” by Jamie Zawinski, one of the coders on the early Netscape Navigator browser - back in 2000. Have geeks really been arguing about this for 20+ years? Looks like it. But, we don’t live in that perfectly coordinated world so spaces maintains the most fidelity - at the expense of programmers not being able to instantly customize the indentation from widths of 2,4,6,8.” “In an ideal perfect world, _all_ of programmers and _all_ text editor tools would use tabs specifically for indentation and spaces specifically for alignment. “After 20+ years of listening to the tabs-vs-spaces debate and considering all the legitimate points that both sides have, many have made the following observation and it’s what resonates with me the most,” wrote one programmer on Hacker News. Google’s post soon went viral, drawing 1,620 comments on Reddit, and also turning up on Gizmodo, Slashdot, and Hacker News. “This is disgusting,” tweeted one freelance web designer in the U.K.Īnd it didn’t end there. “Madness everyone knows tabs are better!” replied a London-based NetApp maintainer. “What is this madness,” tweeted cloud engineer Ed Morgan. When someone referred Castillo to Google’s analysis, he simply added “I knew that.

But in the end, Google failed to bring peace to the developer world.
