I was pro tabs when I started out with software development. It just made sense, right? You press the key once, you get a single symbol, you have your indention, neat. And there is the argument that everyone can adjust their tab sizes, want it to be 2 spaces? 4? 6? Whatever? Awesome!
Then you write actual code and this perception changes. Tabs make a mess, developers often align both code and comments to make sense. That alignment only works at x-spaces and utterly breaks if you change tab width.
An example in C# with LINQ (just semi-random stuff):
var test = customers.Where(c => c.Deleted == false
&& c.Enabled
&& c.HasProducts()
&& blockedCustomers.Contains(c.Id) == false);
This kind of indention only works with spaces, not with tabs. And no, mixing tabs and spaces doesn’t work (like some users claim, that you can indent with tabs and then do alignment with spaces… nope, if you change tab with then your space alignment breaks).
Honestly, I don’t care either way, I just use what my company uses and adapt. But till now it has always been spaces (even though I was team tabs in university) and now I actually prefer spaces as it just makes sense. It’s consistent, it’s easy, it works everywhere.
Btw. the Lemmy code editor is shit, trying to align this was trial and error for a minute :-/
if you change tab with then your space alignment breaks
No, it doesn’t? Here’s the exact same text content with different tab widths:
The tabs are smaller but the spaces are the same, so the alignment remains.
Ah, I see what you mean, out of instinct I’d have put one more tab on the “whatever” line, which would break the concept. But if you manually do both the indent + alignment in spaces then it works.
Besides your IDE of choice screaming at you that you are mixing tabs and spaces that is :)
It still feels like a hack though, simply going with spaces is more uniform and works everywhere. Especially as a lot of code is viewed in browsers nowadays (GitHub, GitLab, …) and tabs are often a mess in those environments.
