....
#Tabs considered harmful?
median gyro
fallen siren
call me crazy but i have hard_tabs = true in my rustfmt.toml
thorn anvil
I saw an article on how indentation style, is a question of accessibility, and that given tabs are pretty consistently and clearly wider than spaces, they're the preferable option when it comes to accessibility...
buoyant charm
how about, NO
strange jackal
Useless troll thread imo
No valuable debate will come out of this since tabs vs spaces is an entirely subjective “discussion” with no real world consequences
willow skiff
I'd say the tabs vs. spaces debate is somewhere in between IRL politics (Ukraine, etc.), and the topic of this server (Rust), in terms of how controversial they are
median peak
No valuable debate will come out of this since tabs vs spaces is an entirely sub...
That is not true. There is exactly one real world consequence, and it is accessibility. What's more it is a really important real world consequence.
Accessibility is the only thing that matters here
strange jackal
I don't see how either is more accessible
which a slight advantage to tabs where the user can set the width (I'd say 0.1% of programmers know this)
most people slinging code just hit the tab key, and the text indents. The actual implementation of why/how it is indented isn't super important imo
high mountain
Since accessibility is mentioned in this, let me quote these two threads:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18414562
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18478776
Hacker News
Hacker News
high mountain
So regarding the accessibility of tab (adjustable indentation), it seems to be limited to the group who has not lost vision entirely, but relies mainly on magnifiers to write code.
Unfortunately any attempt to survey people with disability in a community runs into the problem of chicken and egg: if the community is not accessible, there would be no one with disability to survey. But we can only try.
I wonder whether there is an initiative on this.
crisp badge
tabs are the superior option period
oh wow, this was an old thread
tabs give a unified style, for example if one codebase uses 2 spaces and one uses 4, you cant copy code from one to the other without having trouble with the indents. if both of them used tabs there wouldnt be an issue, plus with tabs each person can have the code display the way they like
and before anyone brings up alignment, you should 1. not write code where thats even an issue 2. if you must, use tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment
dusky nova
I would love an editor feature that actually does that
I’ve also heard of “semantic indentation”, that is throwing away fixed tab stops in their entirety
dapper beacon
Also elastic tabstops
buoyant charm
why are so many people pro tabs, I don't think I've ever seen a codebase using anything other than spaces
dusky nova
I don’t dislike tabs. I dislike code display tools that treat source code as plain text with some color
thorn anvil
Backspace clears spaces in groups of four...? Nice! But if you need to change code formatting in a particular context, it can get screwed up pretty quickly...
pale geyser
I would love an editor feature that actually does that
you'll enjoy this https://media.handmade-seattle.com/dion-systems/
disclaimer: it's not actually a code editor
it's a dedicated program that visualizes an AST and you manipulate the AST directly
no text files are manipulated
dusky nova
Does it still let you type code using the keyboard?
pale geyser
yea, you still type type/function/var names and stuff, you just don't have a backing text file for it
dusky nova
An AST seems too low level for programming against
pale geyser
unfortunately, this means that git/terminal support is very limited, because you're manipulating a serialized AST, not text
fortunately, this means that how the code looks is entirely user-dependent. it can look however you want! you're not rendering text, after all, you're rendering an abstract graph
dusky nova
Or do you mean it visualizes it as code text?
pale geyser
yeah, it visualizes it as code text
dusky nova
Nice
pale geyser
if you type fn it'll declare a function, not type a literal "fn" anywhere, etc
and you can't type invalid syntax because there is no syntax to parse
dusky nova
Code is much more difficult to read without tooling than with
Also does it save an AST or CST?
If it saves an AST you’ll be able to make everything the same code text style
pale geyser
CST?
dusky nova
A very rigid style mind you
Concrete syntax tree, which saves stuff like alignment, superfluous parentheses, multi line method chaining, etc.
With just an AST you get stuff more like rustfmt
pale geyser
yeah none of that at all, it stores as an AST
parenthesis are not saved at all, for example, they're just visualized (and can be typed out) to make it obvious you're declaring a function
but you could configure the graphical part to replace ( with [ if you wanted
anything, so long as it's unambiguous that you are, in fact, declaring a function using the GUI
At least, that's the idea. I don't know if Dion actually got that far. But their progress was really impressive!
dusky nova
Hmm what about blank lines?
Those are the one thing that I think are universally common
Perhaps they are presentation groupings like comments?
buoyant charm
if I press tab and that writes four spaces, does it count as tabs or spaces?
lucid tiger
spaces
pale geyser
Perhaps they are presentation groupings like comments?
I believe so
i.e. they're part of the AST, but they're just ignored during compilation, just like comments
ideally they'd be visually toggleable too
..the sad part is that you kind of need to integrate this into your programming language of choice
you cannot feed this into any existing compiler without forking it, and languages that use it are fundamentally incompatible with eg. vscode unless they have a "text parser" extension or something
high mountain
An AST seems too low level for programming against
(throwing a sneak peek at the lisp scheme and clojure ppl)
lunar agate
sinful slate
oh i didn't expect to be able to move the post into the recent activity section by clicking that
grand magnet
People are always like "spaces are better, use spaces," but nobody can really tell me why. I find tabs to be better for the single reason that it decouples visual indentation from actual indentation. Each indentation level only needs to be one deep and then you set whatever width you want in your editor. What advantage do spaces have? Encforcing the same width for everyone, regardless of preference? Using more bytes per file? Like seriously, why do people like spaces so much?
In any case I'll use whatever convention the programming language or software company/project dictates, because I'm pragmatic, but my preference is definitely tabs.
quartz sail
I completely agree. It seems to me that the obvious and infallible solution is to use tabs for indentation and spaces for the specific cases that you need things to align for aesthetic purposes.
pale geyser
People are always like "spaces are better, use spaces," but nobody can really te...
C# doesn't have a rustfmt equivalent to make things look pretty, so it's done by hand. That often means aligning .s during method chains, which requires the precision that spaces give
So as far as I can tell, spaces are better for fine control, and tabs are better if all your indentations are exactly the same width
And mixed spaces+tabs are better if you want to maximize suffering
grand magnet
Tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment. Will work on any tab width as long as it's all the same number of tabs at the start, and spaces otherwise. And if that's not a supported scenario, then the problem is the tooling, not the concept.
crisp badge
Tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment. Will work on any tab width as long a...
exactly!
i completely agree with this
heady plank
C# doesn't have a rustfmt equivalent to make things look pretty, so it's done by...
Surely someone's written an autoformatter for C# by now? Every other language has at least one tool for this, even if it isn't official.
Anyway, I don't personally see a benefit from using the former over the latter for method chains:
long_var_name.foo()
.bar()
.baz()
.quux()
long_var_name
.foo()
.bar()
.baz()
.quux()
Alignment simply cannot be done using tabs, and if mixing spaces and tabs is undesirable the solution is simply not to align anything. Line beginnings are aligned by default and applying equal indent does not change this regardless of the method of indentation used.
I've actually only seen one argument against tabs that I think truly holds water: If tabs are used, the length of a line becomes ambiguous, so enforcing a maximum line length for all users becomes impossible without mandating a specific tab width for this purpose.
This argument has a flaw, however. If spaces are used, using a nonstandard indent size becomes impossible (without converting the file on save/load at least), which simply avoids the problem of ambiguous line lengths without actually solving it. Line length is also only meaningful if a maximum line length is specified, and if you can specify a maximum line length, why not also specify tab width?
Max line length is best enforced automatically, and the ambiguity only applies to those who use a non-standard tab width. Preventing people from using a non-standard indent size at all doesn't actually solve anyone's problem.
It's funny that this argument lives eternal, considering everyone seems to agree that:
- Consistent style within a codebase is far more important than stylistic choices themselves.
- Any editor should support either tab- or space-based indentation transparent to the method of user interaction.
median gyro
dotnet-format?
pale geyser
that is a formatter, yes
there are plenty of formatters for C# but they aren't even remotely as aggressive as rustfmt
patent kraken
"I've actually only seen one argument against tabs that I think truly holds water: If tabs are used, the length of a line becomes ambiguous, so enforcing a maximum line length for all users becomes impossible without mandating a specific tab width for this purpose.
". I don't agree with this argument as i don't see the need to make all users have the same tab size. I think being able to change the indent size without changing the code is a great part of tabs.
dusky nova
That wasn’t the point
The point was that indented code causes further rightwards drift on higher tab widths
patent kraken
again tab width is configurable in IDE's
dusky nova
Again, you missed the point
The point was that a user would be able to view the code using a tab width that the code was not written to support within the conventional line length constraints
Any more questions should go to @heady plank
heady plank
Yo. I have notifications on for this thread already because I like to allocate my time poorly. 
thorn anvil
The _point_ was that a user would be able to view the code using a tab width tha...
If they're making that an issue, they clearly aren't seriously trying to work with the code... anyone who was, is going to use a setup they find comfortable...