When I've been lucky enough to do green-fields work, I've lobbied the rest of the team for 3-space indents. And the funny thing is that I've never gotten any pushback on it. No one else ever seems to mind. Which is doubly-frustrating for me, because 2-space indents actually present a (minor) difficulty for me. And yet I'm typically looking at 2-space-indented code simply because someone decided years ago that it should be the standard for JS.
You make a really good point about the tab-size CSS feature. If you accept my contention that viewing code in browsers exacerbates the tab hatred, then it makes sense to point the finger at the lack of configurable tab sizes in HTML (in the past). I hadn't even thought of it to that level.
On an even-more-tangential note, it still baffles me that the default indentation for tabs in HTML is 8 spaces. I'm not sure where that came from. I can't think of any other tool I've ever opened where 8-space indents were the default way to display a TAB character.
// , “It is not so important to be serious as it is to be serious about the important things. The monkey wears an expression of seriousness... but the monkey is serious because he itches."(No/No)
This works with pretty much all GitHub links, and recently also works with gist.github.com links. It's annoying that the default isn't something more reasonable (maybe 4?), but you can change it quite easily.
#ActuallyAutistic web dev. Does front of the front-end. Loves perf and minimalism. Prefers HTML, CSS, Web Standards over JS, UX over DX. Hates div disease.
Tabs are 8 characters, and thus indentations are also 8 characters. There are heretic movements that try to make indentations 4 (or even 2!) characters deep, and that is akin to trying to define the value of PI to be 3.
So can we blame Linus Torvalds? It would be nice to get some anger back from him.
But interesting in general that there actually were 8-space indents in the 90's.
I also wonder if the 8-space tabs could have come from spreadsheet editors of the old age. Weren't the cells 8 characters by default?
Ooh, I like that link. Specifically, I like the idea of using longer tab lengths to highlight potential code smells. Despite my long experience, it was only about, ohh, 4-5 years ago when I really started aggressively attacking my own nested code blocks. Originally, I didn't see much problem with them. But I've now come over to the camp that deeperNesting === codeThatShouldProbablyBeRefactored.
As for the spreadsheet observation - yeah... I think that may be one of the original culprits. I know I've heard that before.
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When I've been lucky enough to do green-fields work, I've lobbied the rest of the team for 3-space indents. And the funny thing is that I've never gotten any pushback on it. No one else ever seems to mind. Which is doubly-frustrating for me, because 2-space indents actually present a (minor) difficulty for me. And yet I'm typically looking at 2-space-indented code simply because someone decided years ago that it should be the standard for JS.
You make a really good point about the
tab-sizeCSS feature. If you accept my contention that viewing code in browsers exacerbates the tab hatred, then it makes sense to point the finger at the lack of configurable tab sizes in HTML (in the past). I hadn't even thought of it to that level.On an even-more-tangential note, it still baffles me that the default indentation for tabs in HTML is 8 spaces. I'm not sure where that came from. I can't think of any other tool I've ever opened where 8-space indents were the default way to display a
TABcharacter.I always blame POSIX in in-person conversation, because nobody will bother to look it up.
Fun fact, you can do this:
github.com/DarkWiiPlayer/restia/bl...
vs.
github.com/DarkWiiPlayer/restia/bl...
(Note the
?ts=3at the end)This works with pretty much all GitHub links, and recently also works with gist.github.com links. It's annoying that the default isn't something more reasonable (maybe 4?), but you can change it quite easily.
That's cool! I hadn't seen that little query string variable option before.
One guy claimed that Sun Java source was written in 8 tabs and was not very readable if you tried to look at it in 4 tabs.
But this is also interesting about Linux kernel docs: simplystatistics.org/2018/07/27/wh...
So can we blame Linus Torvalds? It would be nice to get some anger back from him.
But interesting in general that there actually were 8-space indents in the 90's.
I also wonder if the 8-space tabs could have come from spreadsheet editors of the old age. Weren't the cells 8 characters by default?
Ooh, I like that link. Specifically, I like the idea of using longer tab lengths to highlight potential code smells. Despite my long experience, it was only about, ohh, 4-5 years ago when I really started aggressively attacking my own nested code blocks. Originally, I didn't see much problem with them. But I've now come over to the camp that
deeperNesting === codeThatShouldProbablyBeRefactored.As for the spreadsheet observation - yeah... I think that may be one of the original culprits. I know I've heard that before.