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Linus Torvalds reiterates his tabs-versus-spaces stance with a kernel trap (arstechnica.com)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

It's, as Linus mentions, all about bad tooling.

I don't think that anyone disagrees that tabs are "technically" the better choice, as they are a representation of indentation rather than a visual absolute. They aren't visible and your UI should render them as one, two, four spaces or however you would prefer it to appear.

However there were a lot of editors that were shit. They displayed them as four spaces, which IMHO is quite frankly awful to read, and they provide no way to customise it.

As such the world split into two. Those who valued being able to set their indentation to what they preferred, and those that didn't have a tool that displayed the text in a pleasant way.

So we end up with edicts from Python that say "Thou shalt not use tabs", and ones from Linus saying "Thou shalt not not shitty tooling".