this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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Programming

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[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Tabs let you define how big you want each indent to be

…except when they don't. Many common environments have a hardcoded tab size of 8, which is insanely big for using it for indentation.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Because other people might have restricted environment which might not suit their preference is not a good reason to level it down IMO.

Also, I think 9 is the best size for indent (matter of preference), do you think I should switch to space so everyone can enjoy this wonderful view I have ?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ah, the best kind of indent. A tab and a space.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Or just set tabsize to 9, that's the point :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Try it and you'll see

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's not just “might”. Termux is pretty much the only good choice for programming on Android.

I think 9 is the best size for indent (matter of preference), do you think I should switch to space

I think you should switch to an exorcist.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What's your point ? You can use vim on termux and set the tabsize to whatever you want for example.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yes, but if you use something like cat, head, less, etc. to view code, or the Python REPL, you're still going to see the default tab size.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

You can set the tabstop with less -x*n*. But ok I see what you mean. I still stand by my point though. If termux doesn't support setting tabstops and it's an issue, then it's a bug in termux, not a reason to level down your formatting standard.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Also :exorcise is only a quick pluginstall away, anyway. /s

[–] icesentry 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why would you ever need 9 other than trolling people on the internet?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Straight on point!

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (3 children)

What environment are you using that has a hardcoded tab size? I haven't seen this since typewriters.

Some projects just use tabs as a compressed form of 8 spaces. But that is a sin. Use tab to mean "one indent level" and align with spaces if you need to. (the occasional ASCII art diagram)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What environment are you using that has a hardcoded tab size?

  • Termux
  • SourceHut
  • “View page source” in the browser
[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Termux

I think running tabs -N (where N is you preferred tab size) in the terminal should work. This is what I use in my zshrc on desktop.

SourceHut

Yup, they seem to be pretty opinionated here. If you look at the source there is just an inlined style with a single rule pre { tab-size: 8 }. I guess that is what you get when you use opinionated tools. The user's browser isn't right, my preference is right!

“View page source” in the browser

On Firefox this uses my default tab size of 4. But I guess changing this default isn't user-friendly.

[–] JackbyDev 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can't count it as good when it is unconfigurable when it happens to use your preference when the whole selling point of tabs is that they're configurable.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I don't understand what you are trying to say. I agree that SourceHut forcing their preference isn't good. The other two are configurable and I have configured them to my preference on my machines.

[–] JackbyDev 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You made it sound like Firefox wasn't configurable, my bad. I thought you were saying you didn't care that it wasn't configurable because you liked the width they chose.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Oh no. It is configurable, although it requires editing userContent.css. So barely configurable. I think it defaults to 8 but I reduce it to 4.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

I agree that SourceHut forcing their preference isn't good.

I don't think this is a fair point. Every developer makes "opinionated" decisions on default settings on a daily basis. SourceHut is open source and anyone can propose a patch that makes the tab width configurable, which to my knowledge has not happened. "Forcing their preferences" would imo imply that this discussion happened and the patch was rejected without good reason.

To me, this sounds a lot like the usual "I don't like the how this thing that you provide for me for free is doing this one thing so I demand you change it for me free of charge" argument.

[–] icesentry 4 points 1 year ago

Github uses 8 as a default. It's configurable though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

What environment are you using that has a hardcoded tab size?

Microsoft Windows' Notepad. I have sometimes used that when on a public computer.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As an embedded software developer that does linux kernel drivers I've come to love the tab size 8 indentation level.

I'm paraphrasing: "if your indentation level gets too deep, it's time to rethink/refactor your function."

And with tab 8 you'll notice it rather quick if your function does too much/unrelated stuff.

A function should be short and do one thing only, if possible. It also makes unit testing easier if that's a requirement.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

When you're operating on such a low level of abstraction, it's no wonder you don't need deep nesting.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh, I've done my fair share of C++ and Python as well. But you got to agree with me that when you are on your fourth indented "if case" it's time to step back and think about what you are trying to achieve. I mean it's probably going to work, but probably also very hard to maintain that type of code.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How would you implement, for example, Gaussian elimination with at most 3 levels of nesting?

[–] JesperZ 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Abstraction.

The solution for all levels of nesting.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Be specific. Which exact part would you abstract away and how?

[–] JesperZ 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

There a many ways to implement abstractions, but it’s highly dependent on the language in question. You could simply refactor each level of nesting into its own function, with all dependents provided as parameters instead of scoped variables. You could then flatMap to avoid a bunch of nested looping, favoring a linear approach that’s often easier to reason about. You could go all out and refactor all your conditional statements away, in favor of the Either monad. You’d then have a number of functions, each doing one thing (including no nesting), and a main function gluing it all together, linearly. That is a pattern you can always apply; there’s nothing controversial about it, and on a similar note there’s nothing particularly challenging about Gaussian elimination.

[–] JackbyDev 10 points 1 year ago

This is the biggest problem with tabs. Too many tools don't let you adjust the size (or make it very difficult). This is the only reason I usually prefer spaces (only very slightly).

My dream solution is elastic tabstops and I've posted about it here before a few months ago. The problem with wanting elastic tabstops is that it seriously compounds the issue of "editors don't properly support it"

https://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/