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)
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).
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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.