Slashdot Mirror
Open Source Contributions More Important Than Tabs Vs Spaces For Salary (opensource.com)
Jason Baker, a Red Hat data analyst, doesn't believe developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs. An anonymous reader quotes Baker's blog post:
After reading the study one data scientist, Evelina Gabasova, performed some additional analysis and came to a slightly different conclusion, which feels a little more precise: "Environments where people use Git and contribute to open source are more associated both with higher salaries and spaces, rather than with tabs." In other words, if you're at a company where you're using version control and committing open source code upstream, you're statistically a little more likely to be a space-user and a higher wage-earner.
Even across all experience levels, contributing to open source still correlates to higher salaries, Gabasova concludes. "My theory is that when diverse people are working on open source projects together without enforced coding style, the possible formatting mess is nudging people towards using spaces simply because the code is consistent for everyone.
"This is just one of the possible theories, I didn't look to see if possibly language communities that use predominantly spaces (like Python or Ruby) are more active in open source."
Even across all experience levels, contributing to open source still correlates to higher salaries, Gabasova concludes. "My theory is that when diverse people are working on open source projects together without enforced coding style, the possible formatting mess is nudging people towards using spaces simply because the code is consistent for everyone.
"This is just one of the possible theories, I didn't look to see if possibly language communities that use predominantly spaces (like Python or Ruby) are more active in open source."
Wait, there is no connection between spaces, tabs, and how much I make? But I just spent days going through all my code and replacing and reformatting with spaces. Please don't tell me I have to be worried about curly braces.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I can use spaces and contribute to open source projects, it doesn't mean I'm any good at what I do.
Being a good coder is #1, having people skills is #2. Everything else is causation.
Score one for correlation vs. causation.
https://xkcd.com/552/
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
they're going to tell us that the "one true brace style" has no impact on your income!
So.. open source contributions matter more than poor coding preference choices? Who'da thunk that?
Spaces -> the person who writes the code decides how its indentation looks
Tabs -> the person who reads the code decides how the indentation looks
Sometimes I set tabs to be 4 spaces, sometimes 8, sometimes even 2 spaces. However, if the formatting is all done with spaces I don't get that choice. I find tabs more empowering to me personally and I believe that I use them I empower those who read my code.
since I got my first real job in 1976, I've found that grokking tabs is more important than any single other thing I've found. If you can't understand tabs then you probably can't understand more complicated concepts wrt computing. It just sucks that so many bad programmers just can't emulate what they see in existing source code in their own company.
I have no trouble believing that people who submit to Git are more likely to make more money, but parsing it down to whether or not you use tabs or spaces? That seems like too fine a level of granularity.
Of course, I use spaces and submit code to open source projects, so I'm safe.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
...you're a Richard. And RIGBY, tabs are for losers.
Unless you originated the project, the number one rule is consistency. If you do a lot of contributing to open source then you will find a lot of projects with spaces... and regardless of your preference you will stick to that style if you want your code to be merged.
I'm a tab guy, it's just a preference... Yet all of my open source contributions to projects other than my own use spaces.
Read this a while back, had to go digging for it:
https://opensourcehacker.com/2...
P.S. The commentary is more insightful than the article itself.
I have been writing computer programs for well, several decades. I use spaces for the fact that when I cut, paste, yada, yada everything stays. I often have multiple side cut scratch pads open.
;)
;) lol) the learning curve is huge, but in the end you can groom it to do everything, even "Column Blocks" ;)
;)
;)
It is just what I do, there is not one right way
TBH I see the editor as being much more important. I like an editor which is mostly/all keyboard based.
My 2 cents is I don't know what moron decided someone should ever have to take their hands off the keyboard and use a mouse and lose registration.
I hate mice, My first favorite editor was WordStar CPM/TurboDos using terminals. I could do everything from the keyboard. Over the years I have tried many editors. And I have settled on emacs (I know
The key to tech and the reason I enjoy it so much is one must adapt,change and learn constantly
If your not learning something new every 6 months, your out of business 6 months after that
why creimer's salary is so low
https://github.com/CDReimer
What are the chances you are submitting to open source and having a high salary?
Once you hit a high salary, you'll likely be in a fortune 500 company that protects IP or concern about liability and you'll likely not be writing open source code. So this study is great for college grads (again), which have everything in the world to submit to open source (more important than grades nowadays), but not for your 30yr veteran who's likely working in a prestigious corporation that has IP. Sure you'll have some exceptions, but this is the norm.
Only exception is Google, but the software that really makes them money (adwords) is pretty much closed as well as their DLC, Internet service, aircraft, etc... code.
Tabs descend from the manual typewriter, where they were a poor approximation to properly-formatted columnar layouts. Unfortunately now they join several other forms of white-space (because of Unicode) which are sometimes impossible to distinguish from each other. The safest thing to do is thus to only use space for horizontal spacing. Certainly software should not distinguish white-space characters differently. I'm looking at you, "Make", and yes I've heard the story about it being too late to change because there were already 12 users.
Bruce Perens.
Everyone should use Windows Notepad as their code editor. Then the tab spacing will be consistent everywhere.
*ducks*
First, you say Baker "doesn't believe developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs." Then immediately after you say Baker's blog post says "you're statistically a little more likely to be a space-user and a higher wage-earner."
So which is it?
Perhaps designed to demo how far slashdot has fallen?
When using Emacs, the tabs/spaces argument is moot.
When spaces are used, Emacs handles that automatically.
When tabs are used, Emacs also handles that automatically and elegantly.
When both tabs and spaces are used, Emacs also handles that automatically, elegantly, and beautifully.
The world might be a much better place if we all used Emacs.
Kriston
I've been a senior software engineer in a number of companies, small, medium and one of the world's largest companies and I worked with and socialized after work with many of the top positioned and paid software engineers.
Some had home hobby projects, one guy liked woodworking, one rebuilt cars, some did electronic or software projects, a few were open source. Many worked overtime every single day and simply dropped the keyboard after work to go rock climbing, pubbing or spend evenings and weekends with their families.
Sure this is anecdotal, but it does suggest to me that a Red hat analyst might be biased.
It's like the article where number of git accounts were used to count the number of developers in the world. Again, anecdotal, but not a single company I worked in ever used Git. They used private repositories with Clearcase, Perforce, etc.. Git might be rising in popularity recently (eg Microsoft) but it's not world dominating yet. Even stating that it has a certain percentage would just be wild guesswork.
GCC counts tab as 1 char when reporting errors, which can make it slightly harder to coordinate error messages with exact file position in some cases. That is the only issue I ever run into when using tabs. However, the advantages of tabs far outweigh that little difficultly, so in any project where I set the style, the style is tabs. And incidentally, the style for Linux kernel (the largest of all open source projects) is tabs.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
My theory is that when diverse people are working on open source projects together without enforced coding style, the possible formatting mess is nudging people towards using spaces simply because the code is consistent for everyone.
Anybody else see anything resembling this? When there is no enforced coding style, developers will use whatever suits them. Sometimes that's tabs, or sometimes some arbitrary number of spaces. It inevitably ends up being a huge mess.
One of the problems with spaces is that the number of spaces might not be specified, or enforced. So each line is indented with some different number of spaces. I've noticed that about 25% of spaces projects the developers will still use tabs instead of however many spaces their tabs are set to represent. So you'll have lines with 2 spaces, lines with 4 spaces, lines with 6 spaces, and then lines with a tab. I don't blame them for not wanting to type 8 spaces, but it's gonna be a mess if they can't keep it straight.
sw=4:ts=8:no expandtab or GTFO
Tabs for indenting, spaces for aligning.
It is the only way. THE ONLY WAY.
Any other way is shit-tier.
Take your git and blow it up your ass!
People who contribute to open source projects tend to be the more enthousiastic programmers; they are willing to put in hours in their own time as well. That greater enthousiasm could very wel equate to a higher skill level as well (either through getting more practice, or through getting more constructive criticism, or because only people who are already competent at programming gravitate towards doing it as a hobby as well). And that greater competency translates into higher salary levels.
Well, that makes sense, at least... And if enough open source projects mandate spaces, that correlation would extend to the tabs vs. spaces thing as well.
From your bleating on about how it's all U*IX shit tools, there must be non-UNIX tools that aren't shit, but you don't mention any.
So ignoring the blank assertion claims you made, not conceding them as valid, please provide what non-shit tools you've found that make the unix ones "shit".
Still use emacs, modern emacs after all these years...
M-x untabify
Tabs versus spaces is no longer a thing.
http://www.norbertdejonge.nl/pdf/Code_Indentation_Tabs_Versus_Spaces.pdf
"Hard tabs should be used for (leftside) indentation, spaces for (midline) alignment."
For a large number of languages and tools, the amount of whitespace is superfluous and extra whitespace exists solely to lay out the code in a manner that's easier for us meat sacks to read. So I don't get your argument that you can't use a well established layout character for layout. And comparing it to Unicode chars like U+202F (narrow no-break space) is a straw man, tab has been 0x09 since 1963 (officially).
Yes, some languages and tools don't play nice with it. The solution is to use spaces for those tools, not restrict everything because of their limitations.
using spaces simply because the code is consistent for everyone
That's a false assumption.
My father was legally blind. We were sharing code remotely, using spaces, and he could not differentiate the gaps in the same way that I could. Every commit he would change my 2 or 4 spaces to 8 or 16 spaces. Every commit I would change it back, because it was horrible for me. We eventually switched to tabs, and the constant code reformatting stopped because we could each choose how strong that spacing looked for each of us, independently.
At work, they are currently enforcing that we use spaces, so I am.
I would no longer choose to do so on my own project because I know that it makes the code inaccessible to the handicapped. I am quite honestly surprised that this argument goes back and forth. The ADA should probably just start suing companies for being non-compliant.
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
It's not like the compiler keeps that information
It's not like all languages encourage distribution of programs in compiled form either. Programs in Lua, Python, and JavaScript traditionally are distributed in source code or minified form, and minification for Python is less strong because of its use of leading whitespace to mark block boundaries.
I've seen quite capable people shown the door because they had poor people skills
How many of them had Asperger's? Poor people skills are often a symptom of this disability, and it often takes more effort to train otherwise high-functioning autistic workers to improve their people skills. Whose responsibility is it to fund this training? Government or industry?
I'm late getting in here late and I skipped the first round because I was so late, but most people tend to use tabs in projects that are already using tabs. So, any correlation is more likely related to some other attribute of the code, not the presence of tabs. Here is an "interesting" interpretation to troll with: A lot of the earliest open source software was Unix, which had tabs in it; so, you get paid less if you work on old open source software :-).
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us