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.
Posted by savs at March 29, 2005 1:59 PMBlame whoever came up with a Tab being 8 chars wide in the first place - quite rediculously large... If it were orginally between 2 and 4 I doubt we would have this issue...
Tabs are clearly the way and the light, and anyone who says differently is plainly wrong.
Thank the gods that you're using a language that treats whitespace as what it should be - invisible gaps that allow you to tastefully space tokens in a visually appealing way.
Python, on the other hand, is an abomination in my sight. It's no accident that "Python" is an anagram of the Sanskrit word for "Satan".
Posted by: Alex Hudson at March 29, 2005 10:48 PMUhm ... 4-char tabs rules.
Spaces suck.
Four votes in favour of tabs and no votes against... motion carried! Henceforth, the Whole World will use tabs. Let it be so! :-)
Posted by: Andrew Savory at March 31, 2005 12:17 AM