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)
It seems like this basic guideline, tabs to indent and spaces to align, solves the problem for everyone. It doesn’t matter what your tab width is, it’ll look “right” regardless.
This kind of “manual” alignment should be avoided for many reasons including the fact that adding/removing/changing of one parameter here may force you to modify multiple lines which on it’s own is annoying but this will also show up in the diff during review making it harder to grep what was actually changed.
Not like that, lol
Just saying, instead of this monstrosity
CreateOrderRequest(user, productDetails, pricingCalculator, order => order.internalNumber)Just use
CreateOrderRequest( user, ...Putting the first argument on a separate line.
Same if you have an
ifusing a bunch ofand(one condition per line, first one on a new line instead of same line as theif) and similar situations.People seem to have a real issue with using new lines and I’ve never quite understod why.
It feels like a lot of those people are using notepad like applications instead of coding focused ones with collapsible regions etc.
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).
The emacs wiki agrees and has the correct take on this: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SmartTabs
It seems like this basic guideline, tabs to indent and spaces to align, solves the problem for everyone. It doesn’t matter what your tab width is, it’ll look “right” regardless.
This kind of “manual” alignment should be avoided for many reasons including the fact that adding/removing/changing of one parameter here may force you to modify multiple lines which on it’s own is annoying but this will also show up in the diff during review making it harder to grep what was actually changed.
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.