Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
I'm a spaces guy, but agree on the 4. A coder told me decades ago that 4 is better than 2 because if your code starts wrapping due to too many indents you should be refactoring it into functions anyway.
Spaces, in 2026? Why?
In part, because it forces 2-space tab users to confront the indentation issue above
Also there are no drawbacks.. I still hit the tab key to indent (and shift tab to dedent). My editor does the rest.
The drawback to spaces is that people with vision issues or dyslexia lose the ability to make the code more readable in their IDE by adjusting tab size.
I can't speak to dyslexia (but in would guess that 4 spaces is easier than 2?).
At my last job we had a default linter policy of 4 spaces across all languages (python, JS, rust, mostly). We also had a blind coder. He never mentioned it. I'd guess screen readers are capable of dealing with it these days?
You can do the same thing with a linter rule, without forcing everyone to see the code in your preferred way.
That's just not true.
Enlighten me?
You might want to read this: https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/c8drjo/nobody_talks_about_the_real_reason_to_use_tabs/
(There are more downsides of spaces, but I do not care to list everything. It should be obvious that "there are no drawbacks" is a far too general statement. :P)