Developers Who Use Spaces Make More Money Than Those Who Use Tabs (2017)
In the beginning, there was only tabs, and all indentation was exactly one tab greater than the prior context.<p>Then, a few people started doing tabs and then spaces to indent their function arguments to align with the opening parenthesis of function arguments. Why? Because it looks like a windows drop-down menu hierarchy, opening the sub-menu to the right of the selection. These people  tend to be UI-focused, heavy PowerPoint users, CS 101 teachers, and management types.<p>This was okay when everybody was using MSVC or Visual Basic (no Unix person would do this), and so tabs-then-spaces code crept into everything. Tab purists were at worst mildly annoyed. There was no such thing as a space purist. They would have been physically assaulted for banging on a mechanical space bar that many times in a cubicle office.<p>But if you opened up that file in notepad.exe, or wordpad.exe, or TextEdit, or Borland or vi or emacs or any other text editor, you would get a preview of the chaos that was about to be unleashed. When the web became popular, the standard programming environment for a lot of people became “right click -&gt; view source”. Space width was all over the place. Tab width was blowing text off the page. Word wrap was horror, and saving a file in word wrap mode saved the imputed carriage returns.<p>But that was still just aesthetics. When python became popular, it changed behavior. Python tried to adapt by allowing many different styles of indentation. It worked most of the time, but not all the time. This is how it turned into a full-on war.<p>It is easy to convert tabs to spaces, and hard to go the other way. So naturally, people wrote a simple script to convert tabs to the right number of spaces. Then immediately the number of key bangs rose to a deafening roar. Nerf sales went through the roof as the office became a war zone. The accountants were still using pencil and notebook.<p>So people tried to write scripts to convert back to tabs. Hahahaha mortal. You can never go back. Your attempts are futile and the one bug you introduce will be your undoing. Foolish tab purist! Come to the dark side and embrace the space. Yesssss... see that giant bar at the bottom of your keyboard? Hit it! Again! Louder! What’s that? You made a mistake? Lost count? Start over! Hahahahahaha!<p>Then editors changed to no longer record your keystrokes, but instead try to guess at what you mean and show you what it wants you to have meant. These editors have other great features to churn out reams of code that nobody will ever be able to review or keep up with, which is the key to leading a project and getting that promotion. The worse the code, the more people you’ll have to manage to get it working.<p>Meanwhile, tab purists are an exiled minority, unable to find anybody to work with, begrudgingly accepting their orders from some young superstar coder that blew out the git log in their first 30 days on the job.<p>Oh the lowly tab purist. Go home and seethe; you are defeated. Watch again one of the five movies you own on your Betamax or HD-DVD. Better standards? Hahahaha!