I couple reasons I think. First, those who have experience have encountered the tabs vs spaces headaches before. Those with less experience may have only used a few languages, have used fewer tools.
Second, someone who favors precision will tend to favor a space over a tab. People favoring precision tend to get ahead in programming and engineering jobs compared to those who don't mind slack.
This is not easy to do in some tools. I've seen some where you have to change tabs vs spaces settings separately for each programming language it supports. If someone keeps using tabs then you will keep having this problem and it is no longer moot. As soon as a file with tabs in it gets shared between different people and different tools the problem comes back. And with new developers showing up all the time ignorant about the issue or arrogant enough to insist on their own personal style, the problem will not go away.
Experience is key here. If you've dealt with code for 30 to 40 years, you learn what works best, you know what is frustrating and try to avoid it yourself so as to not frustrate others. Code is viewed using more than just your own editor. It'll be seen on multiple editors and IDEs by multiple people who won't know what the preferred setting is. The code will be printed and that adds its own problems as the printer isn't smart enough and you don't always want to have to change settings on each file before printing (and believe me, each file will assume a different tab settings). Very often I view files using a terminal window; 'more', 'grep', 'tail'. The files will be displayed by static analysis tools using a browser, and online repository browser won't know what the preferred settings should be.
Using a character in a file that means "1 to 8 characters" should go against the very grain of any self respecting programmer or engineer that values precision.
I have found it amazingly rare for anyone to defend tabs as a superior choice, instead almost everyone I encounter using it has either not heard of the issue, didn't realize the editor was inserting them, or had trouble changing the tool. And I believe this, I've had people ask me to help set up their editor or IDE to avoid tabs and it can be difficult to find the settings. Sometimes you have to change the settings for each language individually! When I ask someone why tabs were used in a file I will inevitably hear an apology that they didn't realize it was happening.
Now sometimes there's just something wrong or lazy with developers. I have worked on one file that used FOUR different tab indentation levels, with three levels within one function. That is, it was impossible to set a single tab level so that the function showed a consistent indentation level. This means people went and modified the file but refused to conform to the existing indentation levels, even going to far as to ignore that the lines directly above and below did not match. Laziness, orneriness, apathy, or? Either way, I would not have expected those developers to be amongst the higher paid ones.
CEOs are not chosen for their technical competencies. Not even CTOs get to work on technology, they're off full time schoomzing potential customers and investors.
Even if a company has only two people, the jobs will still be divided between the person who does the real work, and the person who does the sales and marketing and promotion.
In general, lots of idiots have trouble anticipating what might happen in the future, even mind boggling easy predictions such as how long will it take until we have to deal with the problem we're kicking down the road. People who stand up and say that there is a problem that needs to be fixed now are often ignored for standing in the way of meeting the deadlines.
That said, for a site called "chess.com", are they really putting the very best engineers on this? For game ids, do they haul out the senior engineers who've lived through multiple snafus in the past, or do they get the new hire? Add a startup into the mix and it's a good bet that there's never even a design or code review involved.
This comes from quoting a zdnet article rather than going to the source. Slashdot is all about making sure the reader has to do lots of research until the real story is discovered. But if you go to the microsoft pages the information can be uncovered.
Everyone makes customer chips with ARMs, and with other processors. These are not PCs where you buy off the shelf parts and combine 20 different chips into what is normally a single chip on an embedded system. Off the shelf SOCs are too generic much of the time and they can be overpriced if you have to go up the tier to get the components you need. So companies instead present their wishlist recipes and get that made into an ASIC, and they'll do this even if the speed doesn't get faster because they'll reduce overall costs.
Custom chips aren't that difficult to get, you don't need to be a gigantic company for this.
Every chip maker with IP has SoCs, that's nothing special. Usually no one worries about this since only the operating system needs to know about the special features whereas the bland applications remain relatively portable. Even if they go to an extreme to add new instructions (so very rarely needed or desired) these aren't going to be things used by the application layer.
There are some companies that do have an advancement track for non-managers. It's not as common as it once was but it is not necessarily rare. I suspect it may make a comeback given the rapid job changing of younger workers. You especially don't want job hopping by senior engineers, it's far too disruptive.
I think for younger workers there is this myth of being rich quickly by just finding the right startup and this encourages changing jobs often.
I used SML for awhile, which is a strongly typed language with dynamic typing. Ie, you do not need to declare types but you will still get warnings and errors at runtime that your types are wrong. This was very baffling to me at first until I started to catch on to what was happening.
Modern C compilers that are fully compliant to the latest standard will compile code that works with C89 (before Python was invented). With a flag or two they will likely compile K&R C as well.
Swift has a very tiny installed base, with few critical systems based upon it. Python has been growing steadily for two and a half decades! You don't just make a few phone calls and get the world to switch over like you can with Swift.
That would have killed off all but the most die hard Python fans. 18 months is an amazingly short period of time for this. I mean that's only 3 password changes away! How to you get the entire world, everyone who uses Python, including those who don't even know who Guido is and aren't a part of the Python socia/compliance network, all switch over in 18 months? Including updating all tools everywhere that use Python or work with Python? It would be easier to fork the bitcoin block chain than this.
I would agree there. I like Python, but it's a pain to make something portable with it. v3 has nice features, but can't use them because v3 is not as commonly installed on all the computers where this is going to run. Most language designers and standards committees do manage to make things backwards compatible when there are newer version.
There is always code coverage and being sure you have 100% code coverage before shipping. But how likely is that? And if you do catch the bug there at the tail end of development, how expensive is it to fix?
I was a proctor for an intro to programming class for a couple of years, teaching Pascal. All the students who showed up already knowing BASIC and proclaiming that they already knew how to program tended to have the most difficulty in the class. Some would whine that it was a waste of time to declare variables.
Declaring variables and their types is very important. The reason there are unit tests and code reviews are to find bugs early, because the earlier you find them the cheaper they are to fix (and horrendously expensive if the customer finds them). So having type checking often means finding bugs very early. It means you don't wait until late in the process before you run a static analysis tool before the errors show up.
No, Trump is famous because he kept himself in the public eye for decades. He's primarily a self promoter. That's why his name was known to the public when the names of more successful real estate tycoons were not. He got his TV show because he was already a celebrity. Now that he's president, he's still being a self promoter.
Obstructing justice is a bad idea. That's what turns a slap on the wrist into a serious crime that attracts high level attention and guarantees that the authorities won't look the other way.
Uber "claimed" doesn't mean much. This is sort of like those crackpots who claim their household is an independent nation and therefore they don't need to pay taxes. Making a claim to be exempt from regulation is meaningless. Uber would have to actually prove it is not a taxi company rather than merely walking, talking, and quacking like one.
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I couple reasons I think. First, those who have experience have encountered the tabs vs spaces headaches before. Those with less experience may have only used a few languages, have used fewer tools.
Second, someone who favors precision will tend to favor a space over a tab. People favoring precision tend to get ahead in programming and engineering jobs compared to those who don't mind slack.
This is not easy to do in some tools. I've seen some where you have to change tabs vs spaces settings separately for each programming language it supports. If someone keeps using tabs then you will keep having this problem and it is no longer moot. As soon as a file with tabs in it gets shared between different people and different tools the problem comes back. And with new developers showing up all the time ignorant about the issue or arrogant enough to insist on their own personal style, the problem will not go away.
Experience is key here. If you've dealt with code for 30 to 40 years, you learn what works best, you know what is frustrating and try to avoid it yourself so as to not frustrate others. Code is viewed using more than just your own editor. It'll be seen on multiple editors and IDEs by multiple people who won't know what the preferred setting is. The code will be printed and that adds its own problems as the printer isn't smart enough and you don't always want to have to change settings on each file before printing (and believe me, each file will assume a different tab settings). Very often I view files using a terminal window; 'more', 'grep', 'tail'. The files will be displayed by static analysis tools using a browser, and online repository browser won't know what the preferred settings should be.
Using a character in a file that means "1 to 8 characters" should go against the very grain of any self respecting programmer or engineer that values precision.
I have found it amazingly rare for anyone to defend tabs as a superior choice, instead almost everyone I encounter using it has either not heard of the issue, didn't realize the editor was inserting them, or had trouble changing the tool. And I believe this, I've had people ask me to help set up their editor or IDE to avoid tabs and it can be difficult to find the settings. Sometimes you have to change the settings for each language individually! When I ask someone why tabs were used in a file I will inevitably hear an apology that they didn't realize it was happening.
Now sometimes there's just something wrong or lazy with developers. I have worked on one file that used FOUR different tab indentation levels, with three levels within one function. That is, it was impossible to set a single tab level so that the function showed a consistent indentation level. This means people went and modified the file but refused to conform to the existing indentation levels, even going to far as to ignore that the lines directly above and below did not match. Laziness, orneriness, apathy, or? Either way, I would not have expected those developers to be amongst the higher paid ones.
If someone did not figure this out while still reading the summary, then I hope they're not a professional programmer.
CEOs are not chosen for their technical competencies. Not even CTOs get to work on technology, they're off full time schoomzing potential customers and investors.
Even if a company has only two people, the jobs will still be divided between the person who does the real work, and the person who does the sales and marketing and promotion.
In general, lots of idiots have trouble anticipating what might happen in the future, even mind boggling easy predictions such as how long will it take until we have to deal with the problem we're kicking down the road. People who stand up and say that there is a problem that needs to be fixed now are often ignored for standing in the way of meeting the deadlines.
That said, for a site called "chess.com", are they really putting the very best engineers on this? For game ids, do they haul out the senior engineers who've lived through multiple snafus in the past, or do they get the new hire? Add a startup into the mix and it's a good bet that there's never even a design or code review involved.
This comes from quoting a zdnet article rather than going to the source. Slashdot is all about making sure the reader has to do lots of research until the real story is discovered. But if you go to the microsoft pages the information can be uncovered.
Everyone makes customer chips with ARMs, and with other processors. These are not PCs where you buy off the shelf parts and combine 20 different chips into what is normally a single chip on an embedded system. Off the shelf SOCs are too generic much of the time and they can be overpriced if you have to go up the tier to get the components you need. So companies instead present their wishlist recipes and get that made into an ASIC, and they'll do this even if the speed doesn't get faster because they'll reduce overall costs.
Custom chips aren't that difficult to get, you don't need to be a gigantic company for this.
Every chip maker with IP has SoCs, that's nothing special. Usually no one worries about this since only the operating system needs to know about the special features whereas the bland applications remain relatively portable. Even if they go to an extreme to add new instructions (so very rarely needed or desired) these aren't going to be things used by the application layer.
There are some companies that do have an advancement track for non-managers. It's not as common as it once was but it is not necessarily rare. I suspect it may make a comeback given the rapid job changing of younger workers. You especially don't want job hopping by senior engineers, it's far too disruptive.
I think for younger workers there is this myth of being rich quickly by just finding the right startup and this encourages changing jobs often.
I used SML for awhile, which is a strongly typed language with dynamic typing. Ie, you do not need to declare types but you will still get warnings and errors at runtime that your types are wrong. This was very baffling to me at first until I started to catch on to what was happening.
Modern C compilers that are fully compliant to the latest standard will compile code that works with C89 (before Python was invented). With a flag or two they will likely compile K&R C as well.
Swift has a very tiny installed base, with few critical systems based upon it. Python has been growing steadily for two and a half decades! You don't just make a few phone calls and get the world to switch over like you can with Swift.
That would have killed off all but the most die hard Python fans. 18 months is an amazingly short period of time for this. I mean that's only 3 password changes away! How to you get the entire world, everyone who uses Python, including those who don't even know who Guido is and aren't a part of the Python socia/compliance network, all switch over in 18 months? Including updating all tools everywhere that use Python or work with Python? It would be easier to fork the bitcoin block chain than this.
I would agree there. I like Python, but it's a pain to make something portable with it. v3 has nice features, but can't use them because v3 is not as commonly installed on all the computers where this is going to run. Most language designers and standards committees do manage to make things backwards compatible when there are newer version.
There is always code coverage and being sure you have 100% code coverage before shipping. But how likely is that? And if you do catch the bug there at the tail end of development, how expensive is it to fix?
I was a proctor for an intro to programming class for a couple of years, teaching Pascal. All the students who showed up already knowing BASIC and proclaiming that they already knew how to program tended to have the most difficulty in the class. Some would whine that it was a waste of time to declare variables.
Declaring variables and their types is very important. The reason there are unit tests and code reviews are to find bugs early, because the earlier you find them the cheaper they are to fix (and horrendously expensive if the customer finds them). So having type checking often means finding bugs very early. It means you don't wait until late in the process before you run a static analysis tool before the errors show up.
No, Trump is famous because he kept himself in the public eye for decades. He's primarily a self promoter. That's why his name was known to the public when the names of more successful real estate tycoons were not. He got his TV show because he was already a celebrity. Now that he's president, he's still being a self promoter.
I don't think anyone has ever persuaded someone to their own point of view through the use of insults. The opposite is what generally happens.
Nixon was doing it before it was cool.
Human decency has a liberal bias?
And since no one on slashdot fits that description, that means no progressives are commenting on slashdot?
Except for Uber customers being progressive hipsters form urban cores.
Obstructing justice is a bad idea. That's what turns a slap on the wrist into a serious crime that attracts high level attention and guarantees that the authorities won't look the other way.
Uber "claimed" doesn't mean much. This is sort of like those crackpots who claim their household is an independent nation and therefore they don't need to pay taxes. Making a claim to be exempt from regulation is meaningless. Uber would have to actually prove it is not a taxi company rather than merely walking, talking, and quacking like one.