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Tabs are objectively better than spaces - gomakethings.com (gomakethings.com)

submitted 1 year ago by mac@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev

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[–] wgs@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

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)

[–] realharo@lemm.ee 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] wgs@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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).

[–] natecox@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] PHLAK@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] wgs@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 year ago

I personally favor code readability over patch readability. But I reckon this is a matter of preference so I can understand how you might not like that.

[–] catastrophicblues@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 year ago

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.