Yesterday, I shared some spicy takes. A few were particularly controversial—most notably, that I correct Gif the correct way (with a soft G)—but I also got a lot of emails asking me to elaborate on a few of them.
Today, I wanted to talk about how tabs are objectively better than spaces. This won’t take long.
Tabs let you define how big you want each indent to be, and spaces do not.
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)
It does help with reducing thrashing between edits in git diffs. Or rather, opinionated autoformatters do, which is the only reason I bother with alignment.
Anything for indent (barely matters, as long as the editor forces it to stay consistent), and fuck alignment, just put things on a new line.
struct Ident arr = [ { .id = 0, .name = "Bob", .pubkey = "", .privkey = "" }, { .id = 1, .name = "Alice", .pubkey = "", .privkey = "" } ];Not like that, lol
Just saying, instead of this monstrosity
CreateOrderRequest(user, productDetails, pricingCalculator, order => order.internalNumber)Just use
CreateOrderRequest( user, ...Putting the first argument on a separate line.
Same if you have an
ifusing a bunch ofand(one condition per line, first one on a new line instead of same line as theif) and similar situations.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)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.
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).
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.
People seem to have a real issue with using new lines and I’ve never quite understod why.
It feels like a lot of those people are using notepad like applications instead of coding focused ones with collapsible regions etc.
The way god indented.
I almost scrolled past this one
seconded on not aligning things. its the whole source of the problem in the first place and doesnt even serve a purpose
It does help with reducing thrashing between edits in git diffs. Or rather, opinionated autoformatters do, which is the only reason I bother with alignment.