Because we are a very small team, I’ve always been good with “use whatever coding style you want!” I try to adapt to the conventions used in other people’s projects. But lately, I just want to go all-in on mandating real tabs. I’m getting too old to deal with tabs-as-spaces.
@manton Oh this feels like the kind of thing that could be helpful even to contributors. Like if it was stated on GitHub, even if it was just to let people know "this is the preferred style" when submitting a PR. Honestly I wouldn't even be bothered if it was mandated there, although I assume people have feelings about that due to the nature of voluntary work on open source projects.
@manton were a small team too and often we just divide and conquer our own parts of the code base to avoid fighting over tabs vs spaces.
When we do collide, I just reindent the entire script LOL
@manton Are you sure you don't want to go with spaces? 😉 Developers Who Use Spaces Make More Money Than Those Who Use Tabs.
@manton it is my firm belief that every project should have a formatter that runs in CI at a minimum, and even better as a pre-commit hook. In languages like Elixir where you can just do mix format very fast on save at all times, I don't care or think about style. It's not a choice thing, this is just how it's done. It's great.
@manton whenever I see this surfacing into an online debate I'm reminded of the Silicon Valley episode where it ends a seemingly perfect romantic relationship. 😁
@jsonbecker @manton I joined a team that didn’t use a formatter last year and it was maddening. I’d forgotten how nice it is to just not think about formatting and still get a consistent style.
@JohnPhilpin 🤔 Is that reflected in the raw data? From the article, it seems like salary differences diminish somewhat around 11–15 years of experience. However, that doesn't mean people start preferring spaces less as they gain experience, right?
And just for the record, for anyone following this thread: I don’t have a preference when it comes to spaces vs. tabs. 😊 I just use whatever the project I’m contributing to uses. When I start new projects on my own and actively think about indentation (which I rarely do), I choose whatever is most common in the language I’m coding in. (For example, spaces for Ruby and JavaScript, and tabs for C and Go.)
@manton You may like the way Go does it. The community has a pretty strict formatting convention, to the degree that most Go code editors will auto-format a file on save. It took a while for me to adjust, but now I think it's great: I can just rely on the formatter when writing new code. And yes, they've adopted tabs over spaces.
@manton Haha, just pulling your leg because I exactly know I am a spaces guy without even using the spacebar (by pressing tab) 😂
Not sure about the ‘raw’ data .. just looking at the graph …
As you say, salaries paid to both ‘spaces’ and ‘both’ so slow down at the 11 to 15 year mark, whereas the ‘tab’ curve just keeps going.
My inference is that with experience the only way to keep your salary increasing at the same rate is sticking with Tabs - anything else and it starts to drop off.
Conclusion - the people that pay the bills recognize that ‘Tabs’ is the way to go and reward accordingly.
I also freely accept that the data is almost certainly not connected.
‘#JustTryingToStartAConspiracyTheoryHere! 😆
