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Developers Who Use Spaces Make More Money Than Those Who Use Tabs (stackoverflow.blog)
An anonymous reader writes: Do you use tabs or spaces for code indentation? This is a bit of a "holy war" among software developers; one that's been the subject of many debates and in-jokes. I use spaces, but I never thought it was particularly important. But today we're releasing the raw data behind the Stack Overflow 2017 Developer Survey, and some analysis suggests this choice matters more than I expected. There were 28,657 survey respondents who provided an answer to tabs versus spaces and who considered themselves a professional developer (as opposed to a student or former programmer). Within this group, 40.7% use tabs and 41.8% use spaces (with 17.5% using both). Of them, 12,426 also provided their salary. Analyzing the data leads us to an interesting conclusion. Coders who use spaces for indentation make more money than ones who use tabs, even if they have the same amount of experience. Indeed, the median developer who uses spaces had a salary of $59,140, while the median tabs developer had a salary of $43,750.
Pied Piper proves it too, that tab loving company is one money losing screwup after another.
Proof: neither side makes jack-shit as a coder
If the median salary was under $50k, then I'm not sure who they were surveying, but it wasn't professional developers.
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Those idiots take four times longer or more to indent their code compared to those of us who use tabs and get home earlier thus working less hours.
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Using spaces increased my earnings by 4x over tabs.
I'd think that space vs. tab use is highly dependent on which programming language you're using, and I'd also think that language is correlated with earnings, so I highly doubt this conclusion (if they're trying to conclude anything). Correlation is not causation.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Most of the respondents wouldn't have understand the question because they actually use whatever their IDE does.
Modern IDEs format code automatically and use spaces or tabs based on your settings. In addition, the auto formatter automatically adds whitespace when you go into the next line. It is most likely not a real dependency between whitespace and salaries, but it has more to do with which environment they use.
Programmers who use spaces are more likely to lie about how much money they make.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
One space or two after a period?
Sorry wrong crowd :P
(and don't you heathens dare say one)
Using spaces to indent is really kind of an OCD thing to do. There's the time and the counting and then redoing when you change something.
So maybe the real lesson is the OCD programmers make a bit more than non-OCD programmers.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I can actually see the argument for a 4-space indent consisting of 3 spaces and a tab. The developer thinks they're throwing a bone to people who use tabs by allowing them to set their own indent width. But they're wrong to use spaces at all in that case; what about people who prefer 2- or 3-char indents?
And that's why tabs should be the standard: people prefer different indents. Using tabs, everyone can have their way; set your tab width and all tabbed indents are automatically the width you want.
Now, for those who insist on tabs, let me explain why spaces are better: they allow you to align parameters and operators after the indent.
That's why my preference is to use tabs to indent, then spaces to align after the indent; best of both worlds. You're already using the tab key to indent and the spacebar to align, so there's no mental or physical overhead involved, the layout of your code is preserved and, if someone else prefers a different tab width, they can have it without breaking the alignment of arguments or operators (if you bother to make them look pretty) or altering how the code displays for you, or anyone else.
But, that's just a preference. When I'm working on someone else's code, I follow their conventions, because it really doesn't take any time at all to change an IDE setting (especially when my IDE can store per-project settings for things like tab width) and I'm not a dick.
Beyond that, if someone uses tabs on some lines and spaces on others within the same file... yes, slap them silly.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
The reason that most places don't have these check in hooks is simple - rule 1 in all good style guides is "if breaking the style guide in one off cases makes code substantially clearer, break the style guide."
Humans need to have the ability to say "no, in this one case it makes sense to do something odd to make this code readable".