The hardest thing

You know the toughest thing about collaborating with other people on projects?

It’s not where they are in the world. It’s not what language they speak. It’s not their preferred development language. It’s not even time zones, bug tracking, project management, operating systems or IDEs.

It’s indentation. Tabs vs. Spaces is a holy war, and as with all holy wars, there can be no winners. Well, other than the psychiatrists.

Most ASF projects stick with three spaces. Some of the people I collaborate with prefer four spaces. Some prefer two spaces. Occasionally I see code with spaces and tabs intermixed arbitrarily.

I’m firmly on the side of tabs. With a tab, who cares if it’s set to be four columns wide, or two, or twenty?

Please don’t tell me to use an editor that munges spaces as some pseudo-tabular evil hack. Just pass me the tranquilisers and the hair restorer.

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