Linus Torvalds reiterates his tabs-versus-spaces stance with a kernel trap
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
Lol.. Yes, also! I don't think that was in my arsenal back then.
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
I agree, JSON is overkill and problematic. I haven't seen a compelling reason why YAML is better than stock .properties files.
Upvote
5
(5
/
0)
I just can't understand why someone would want to hit a key sequence 2/4/6/8 times versus ONE time in order to accomplish the same effect. Extra bonus: A decent editor will allow configuration of that spacing for tabs so you can customize it to your preferences. Personally, I'm a tabs person, I have no hate for those who aren't. To quote the kids these days, "You do you, boo." In this context, this really is a personal preference issue, so there is no right or wrong answer.
As for the debate in relation to a code parser, I just don't get it. For as long as I can recall, most things I've ever used treat tabs, and spaces (and sometimes hard spaces*) identically as they were considered "whitespace characters." Honestly, as previously mentioned, if your parser is having issues with a tab, change the code, not the data.
* Hard spaces = chr$(255), or for the REALLY old farts, holding the alt key down while typing "255" on the numpad. The only time I recall this being an issue was back in ye olden days where hard spaces were allowed in filenames when regular spaces weren't.
As for the debate in relation to a code parser, I just don't get it. For as long as I can recall, most things I've ever used treat tabs, and spaces (and sometimes hard spaces*) identically as they were considered "whitespace characters." Honestly, as previously mentioned, if your parser is having issues with a tab, change the code, not the data.
* Hard spaces = chr$(255), or for the REALLY old farts, holding the alt key down while typing "255" on the numpad. The only time I recall this being an issue was back in ye olden days where hard spaces were allowed in filenames when regular spaces weren't.
Upvote
-7
(0
/
-7)
Upvote
5
(5
/
0)
This age old debate reminds me of another one I see often as a bass player - pic or finger picking.
But then there's the whole whitespace delineation abomination thing that says Pic or finger? Naw son, electric drill.
But then there's the whole whitespace delineation abomination thing that says Pic or finger? Naw son, electric drill.
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
Spaces are good for giving you RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury), or a muscular spasm akin to Parkinson's Disease, from hitting the space bar all the time.
Upvote
-9
(2
/
-11)
Upvote
5
(5
/
0)
From the article "... Linux kernel 6.9, which Torvlads wrote had ...". Linus Torvalds now has his own fan-club called the "Torv lads"? If not, it definitely should exist 
. (Please don't correct the typo,- it might be the start of something huge)
. (Please don't correct the typo,- it might be the start of something huge)
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
Genuine question. Can you store hierarchical and/or list data in a .properties file? Because in my one exposure to using YAML I ended up with something like:
I could consume this and generate an internal data structure that matched the YAML structure.
It looks like to me that a .properties file is simply a list of key/value pairs, so anything more fancy than that will require me to write code. And I really love this quote:
Upvote
4
(4
/
0)
Using blocks of spaces in computer programming, instead of using the specific character only intended for this purpose (tabs) reminds me of office administrators who make data tables in Microsoft Word with tabs or spaces (no CR/LF, they just keep adding spaces until the cursor comes around to the next line), instead of using actual tables.
Also somewhat maddening: the PHP FIG (Framework Interop Group) held votes on various language syntax standards several years ago. There were roughly equal numbers of votes for tabs vs. spaces. So one of the people in charge of the project, who personally favored spaces, decided to impose an edict that henceforth, standards-compliant PHP shall only use spaces (not tabs!) Could there be any clearer evidence that the group's governance model is broken?
Also somewhat maddening: the PHP FIG (Framework Interop Group) held votes on various language syntax standards several years ago. There were roughly equal numbers of votes for tabs vs. spaces. So one of the people in charge of the project, who personally favored spaces, decided to impose an edict that henceforth, standards-compliant PHP shall only use spaces (not tabs!) Could there be any clearer evidence that the group's governance model is broken?
Upvote
-4
(4
/
-8)
I once had to maintain code with a programer who used 132 character line widths and tabs.
Upvote
0
(2
/
-2)
One thing that causes furor in this debate is that is some assumption, basically, that the other side is essentially doing stupid things. I think tabs are better than spaces if people use their tools properly, and I don’t think it is really up for debate, but I also don’t think people who are using spaces are, like, trying to do headstands while typing or something ridiculous.
There isn’t an alignment issue between different tab widths if you use tabs for indenting, and spaces for alignment. The way it works is, you indent with tabs as appropriate for the scope. That all happens on the left side of the row, before you hit any syntax. That’s where tabs go, they are the only thing that goes there, and that’s the only place they go. There aren’t any issues around variables or operators having different widths, because there spaces where tabs and variables go don’t overlap.
<tabs>var = eqn <spaces> ! Comments
<tabs>longVar+= eqn2<spaces> ! Comments
As you can see, “tabs” can be any width, there’s no chance of an alignment issue. It gets pretty frustrating to have people describe this apparent problem, which requires us to do something stupid to have it, as if it is a real problem.
Similarly, some tabs supporters think that people are actually hitting spacbar a bunch of times to get the right number of times. I agree with them that tabs are better, but they are incorrect to assume the people using spaces are that stupid. Every ide worth using has the ability to automatically do the space indenting. I assume that is similarly annoying.
Upvote
3
(10
/
-7)
Nobody, nobody is arguing against the tab button. We all like pressing tab to insert a large gap before our text. People who "don't like tabs" don't like the tab character, for various reasons.
If everybody followed that convention perfectly, it would be nice enough - but not notably better than just using spaces for most people. Yes, you could configure the depth of your indentation. That's about the only advantage I can see. But Hell is other People, and in no universe will people consistently use tabs without spaces before text, and no tabs in the middle of a line. At the end of the day we're all still stuck relying on pre-commit hooks to unmangle the code.
Last edited:
Upvote
5
(6
/
-1)
having it write regex for you is the single most useful thing an LLM can do for your day
Upvote
-2
(1
/
-3)
At least YAML can have comments. Big plus in my book.
But yes, two-space indents that just have to be just right is a pain.
Block delimiters rule.
Python taught to world to accept whitespace as actual structure.
Only defense for whitespace-as-structure is that you cannot obscure logic with clever indenting.
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)
Only with perfect unity, where everyone agrees, and no one ever inserts spaces. You tend not to get that unless doing machine formatting.
In the real world when you allow tabs, you get a mix of tabs and spaces, and that's a mess unless you use the same exact tab width as the codes author.
Which is probably why all the style guides we had at work had "Spaces only" policy. That way the code looks the same for everyone.
Upvote
8
(8
/
0)
At least you could schema validate XML and the better toolchains were good at creating & analysing.
Anything more than 10 lines of YAML shouldn't be intended for manual editing, looking at you k8s!
JSON is a crap data contract. Yes you can human read/edit it, but you shouldn't need to do this for data flowing between services. And people write terrible JSON structures with no versioning and leave it up to the API consumer to correctly parse their shit.
Sometimes I miss ASN.1 & DER (Good sign I need to go get more coffee, as I don't miss naive parsers and buffer overflows)
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)
Except 4 character tabs means you might go over the 80 column limit when your code is viewed with 8 character tabs.
(Although the 80 column limit was changed into a soft limit a couple years ago)
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
Your editor isn't set to automatically indent with spaces when you press tab?
We're talking here about the tab vs space characters, not the keys.
Upvote
6
(6
/
0)
When working on a project with others, it doesn't matter which you prefer. You follow the project's coding style. If that is causing issues, you discuss it and explain the problem instead of just making a commit that disregards it.
Upvote
5
(5
/
0)
It depends on the project kinda, I think. On a proper project with a style guide and code review, just reject any patches that do it wrong.
It might not be better for most people, but it isn’t worse for anybody. And it is useful. For example, if I want to get a high-level overall view of the structure of my code, I can zoom out and set tab width to 8. Normally, I keep it at 3. The Linux kernel coding guide has it set to 8, with the justification:
IMO, large tabs can be kind of annoying, but they are also good for scanning for these “more than 3 levels of indenting” messes, which need inspection, so having them flexible is really nice.
In a properly written program, converting tabs to spaces doesn’t just implement a preference. It destroys information about the programmer’s understanding of the control-flow of the program in a non-reversible way. It is a malicious thing to do.
Upvote
-2
(3
/
-5)
This is fun, but why do the letters move around after you solve a puzzle? It bothers me.
Upvote
2
(2
/
0)
That style looks very weird to me in that it makes it seem as if INNER and JOIN are separate things, and that it puts ON and AND on the same level as INNER JOIN and WHERE.
I would format this statement like this:
Code:
SELECT u.id, u.name, u.email
FROM users AS u
INNER JOIN address AS a
ON u.id = a.user_id
WHERE
a.state = 'CA'
AND a.country = 'USA'
ORDER BY u.id
;Maybe it's just because that's what I'm used to, but to me that's much easier to read.
Upvote
4
(5
/
-1)
Well, I haven't coded assembly in about 30 years. But my favorite project was on the C-64.
I was a broke teenager and couldn't afford the macro assembler cartridge. So I wrote my own assembler in C-64 BASIC, which included support for address labels and the entire 6502 instruction set. Since the C-64 didn't have a text editor, I wrote a version EDLIN, also in C-64 BASIC.
Best $35 I didn't spend.
Upvote
8
(8
/
0)
Unfortunately until you use some kind of tool (such as diff variants) that put anything at the start of the line which may or may not be wider than a tab.
It would certainly change the configuration I've generally met in tools. Particularly:
<tabs>foo = myfun(z * (17 * x +
<tabs> 13 * y));
...where I can hit tab once on the second line and get indented to match the opening parenthesis - but I certainly wouldn't rely on all my tools being set up to distinguish spaces from tabs when doing so.
For what it's worth, the elastic tabstops I've been mentioning in these comments let you write:
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
I really should have got that from the names. I'm so ashamed.
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
My wife wishes me to point out that they're tabby cats, not spacey cats.
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)
I could have sworn in 1998-1999 I got flamed for submitting a patch for a module that had tabs. When I was in college I was 100% a tabs guy. Almost all my code didn't have anyone else working on it so it was never an issue. It wasn't Linus who flamed me. I'd have remembered if it was him. I can't remember who it was, but it really turned me off from helping cause the flaming was WAY out of line relative to the offense. I had put in a solid week of work to write a device driver for a chip Linux didn't have support for, about 10k lines of code. The guy was saying he was going to come kill my mother or something horrible over the tabs vs space stuff.
Maybe different parts of the kernel for modules get to have different code standards?
Every single job I have ever had since graduation (25 years) has had spaces as the standard IIRC. Editors handle this so well now. At this point we've moved on to new types of stupid arguments. The project I'm on right now if you don't put a space after "if" before the condition that will literally break the build our code standards are so rigid. That is mostly to eliminate giant PR/MR stuff that makes code review hard, and we have good auto format tools to mostly get rid of the pain of writing whitespace in an exact way in language which do not care about whitespace.
Maybe different parts of the kernel for modules get to have different code standards?
Every single job I have ever had since graduation (25 years) has had spaces as the standard IIRC. Editors handle this so well now. At this point we've moved on to new types of stupid arguments. The project I'm on right now if you don't put a space after "if" before the condition that will literally break the build our code standards are so rigid. That is mostly to eliminate giant PR/MR stuff that makes code review hard, and we have good auto format tools to mostly get rid of the pain of writing whitespace in an exact way in language which do not care about whitespace.
Upvote
2
(2
/
0)
Someone who understands the importance of readability -- and that fixed-width fonts are less readable. That's why books, newspapers and this website use proportionally-spaced fonts.
Sure, it's not such a big deal if all your variable names are one or two characters -- but it's not the 20th century any more: use proper meaningful names for variables, clases etc. And write decent comments. All these things mean you need a more readable font.
Upvote
-11
(0
/
-11)
The Linux command “column” can do something like the elastic tab stop you’ve described, I think, if you pass it the -t argument it’ll look at all your columns and pick a column width so that they fit tidily. These aren’t really tabs though (although you could tell it that the column separator is the tab character).
I think the reason this isn’t built into more text editors is that it requires passing over the whole file to find the maximum width for each column, for the file. For this use-case in particular it could be interesting to just scan across the current screen though, or a limited space around it… You could get some annoying jumping as you scroll through a file, but that isn’t the end of the world.
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
I'll disagree with you there. Proportional fonts may make natural language more readable, but I've found they make machine languages deceptively more readable i.e. my brain is more likely to interpret something which is not quite a natural-language word in the code as something other than what is actually written.
While the advice of using clear symbol names is good, it's rare that the code I write is the only code I'm interacting with, and that's before you get into style guides (like Rust's) which advocate terseness.
Upvote
12
(12
/
0)
Proportional fonts are intended to make reading comfortable not necessarily super legible. How many Ls and how man Is are in the line below? Answer fast!
lIlIIl
Upvote
6
(6
/
0)
You should really help out people who are using spaces to do their aligning by hand. They seem to have trouble with it. Whenever you see a project that uses spaces, run something like:I'm so dedicated to tabs that I actually write all my code in a spreadsheet, and then copy/paste it to a text editor before compilation!
cat whatever.c | tr -s ‘ ‘ | column -t > tmp
mv tmp whatever.c
git commit -a -m “finally everything is aligned with spaces”
git push
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
That's one big problem I have with tabs: if you want to align things vertically or have a fixed max line length, tabs aren't consistent and introduce unnecessary variability.
Also, I'm curious whether the author wrote this article just for engagement bait so we'd argue about this in the comments
Upvote
2
(3
/
-1)
Actually EMACS was all the rage for a time until Clifford Stoll found that notorious hole. Long live VI and “set -o vi“ for command retrieval. Try this: barbecue sauce, ham, 1/4 Muenster, 3/4 Pepper Jack, pineapple and snippets of green onion.
Upvote
-1
(0
/
-1)
If the inability to distinguish between I and l is a huge problem for the project l think something much deeper is wrong.
Still though, I would like a font where the lower case l’s are little cursive loops.
Upvote
-3
(1
/
-4)