Alright, I'm going to chime in though I've been trying to sit on my hands for the sake of my own sanity.
--- * Using spaces forces all developers to a specific tab width. Requires more keystrokes, or a config change to make the tab key output spaces instead. --- This is where I facepalm. Do you really think that if I want to indent twice, which could mean 8 spaces, I have to press the space bar 8 times? A decent editor is easily configured to translate a tab keypress into 4 spaces. It can also use smart indentation to guess where I need the next indentation to be. If the complaint is that this configuration has to be setup at the beginning, I'd like to know how often someone _doesn't_ do that with almost any software. --- Using tabs is clearly superior technically. However since some developers use spaces, there is danger of entering into "mixed mode". Therefore a mandated style guide to pick one is important. --- But forcing everyone to use the same style guide so no matter what tools are used, be it IDE or text editor (which some don't handle tabs and spaces intelligently), the indentation will be the same. If you want things to be uniform then using spaces would achieve the uniformity better than tabs, which sounds like the superior choice to me. Hooray for opinions! --- IMHO, some people prefer spaces because they don't understand their tools enough to set a custom tab width, and they want a different tab width from default. So they resort to this terrible hackery to get a custom tab width. --- You claim that people who use spaces do so because they don't understand their tools, but make this claim after suggesting that said developers press the space bar multiple times to indent. Pot, meet kettle. And if they want something different from the standard default of 4 spaces, why not simply use 4 spaces instead of implementing extra logic into an editor to handle 4 spaces as a tab? More work to achieve the same effect to account for a fringe case? Sounds like hackery to change spaces into tabs. Honestly, the arrogance of saying developers are too dumb to learn their tools if they choose spaces goes beyond giving your opinion as to why you like tabs better and into the realm of ad hominems. "You don't agree with my opinion? Well you must be too stupid to understand things." That's how you came off, at least to this dumb space-using developer. On Wed, May 13, 2015 at 9:31 AM, Timothy Humphrey < [email protected]> wrote: > Lonnie++ > > > > On May 13, 2015, at 10:28 AM, Lonnie Olson <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 6:27 PM, Timothy Humphrey > > <[email protected]> wrote: > >> I regret asking the original question. Please stop now. > > > > We can stop now. Here is the summary of the results. > > > > * Every project must agree on a standard. > > * The PSR-2 is a popular standard to choose, but there are others. > > * Tabs are technically superior to spaces. (There have been zero > > technical reasons given by the space proponents) > > * Many developers care very deeply about this decision. > > > > It seems strange to me that, among developers, for at least this > > topic, reasons of popularity trump actual technical reasons. > > > _______________________________________________ > > UPHPU mailing list > [email protected] > http://uphpu.org/mailman/listinfo/uphpu > IRC: #uphpu on irc.freenode.net > _______________________________________________ UPHPU mailing list [email protected] http://uphpu.org/mailman/listinfo/uphpu IRC: #uphpu on irc.freenode.net
