• xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • z3bra@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      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 ?

    • kevincox@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      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)

      • xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

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

        • Termux
        • SourceHut
        • “View page source” in the browser
        • kevincox@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          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@programming.dev
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            1 year ago

            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.

            • kevincox@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              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@programming.dev
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                1 year ago

                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.

                • kevincox@lemmy.ml
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                  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.

              • ck_@discuss.tchncs.de
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                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.

      • Faresh@lemmy.ml
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        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.

    • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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      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/

    • IRQBreaker@startrek.website
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

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

        • IRQBreaker@startrek.website
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org
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            1 year ago

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

                • JesperZ@programming.dev
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                  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.