Sunday, May 10, 2020

Spaces beats tabs (by a factor of a thousand!)


Yes, there are reasonable arguments for each approach. I know that the accessibility argument for tabs is very strong. But I use spaces. It seems that so many people also do that I'm surprised that this is still an issue.

How many more? (Well, if the title wasn't a give-away) a thousand times more!!!

I have a Visual Studio extension for manipulating comments. It recently passed a thousand installs.
I also recently had a bug filed against it. The bug only affected code that used tabs instead of spaces.

Based on this single, unscientific data-point, it looks like there are at least one thousand people using spaces for each one using tabs.

Yes:
- this isn't scientific.
- this is me twisting the statistics to make a point.
- others may have encountered this but not reported a problem.
- installs and actuals use aren't the same things.

Why is this worth blogging about?
- This number is MUCH bigger than I was expecting.
- This debate is usually based on arbitrary preference and not on data. (I have data because I'm doing something that involves code manipulation and parsing.)


I'm not bothered about which you use (as long as it's not a mixture of the two--now that's barbaric!)

1 comment:

I get a lot of comment spam :( - moderation may take a while.