Programming

17686 readers

140 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

158

Tabs are objectively better than spaces - gomakethings.com (gomakethings.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

155 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

When I talk about alignment it's not about function arguments, but values, "=" signs and such. You simply cannot use tabs for that because alignment must be fixed and indentation independent:

CreateOrderRequest(
    user,
    productDetails     => order.detail,
    pricingCalculator  => DEFAULT_CALCULATOR,
    order              => order.internalNumber)

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I normally avoid that too, I find it hurts readability more than helps, plus a proper IDE will separate it with color anyway.

But yeah, the newline comment doesn't apply to this.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To each their own indeed. But my rule of thumb is: only use tabs when there's no other character before it (aka, start of line).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The emacs wiki agrees and has the correct take on this: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SmartTabs

It seems like this basic guideline, tabs to indent and spaces to align, solves the problem for everyone. It doesn’t matter what your tab width is, it’ll look “right” regardless.

[–] PHLAK 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This kind of "manual" alignment should be avoided for many reasons including the fact that adding/removing/changing of one parameter here may force you to modify multiple lines which on it's own is annoying but this will also show up in the diff during review making it harder to grep what was actually changed.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I personally favor code readability over patch readability. But I reckon this is a matter of preference so I can understand how you might not like that.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Yeah I agree I don’t find alignment very useful. It’s more work for dubious benefit, and god forbid you change one of the lines.