Programming Throwdown, Episode 46.

Take it away, Jason.

Awesome.

So I'm going to have a little rant time here about tabs versus spaces.

I don't know if you've had this rant at your work, but the Go, like, you know, spec, like the Go.

What do you call it?

Like the thing that just... Go Lang. No, no, I know, but the document that sort of the Go style guide

talks about, you know, using tabs, and you actually have to do some, like, trickery to make it support spaces.

And I just, I hate tabs. I mean, here's the thing. I use tabs.

Well, I like the tab button because usually it does not insert the tab.

Usually it does something much more useful, like take you to the beginning of a line or something

like that.

So the tab key can stay, but the tab character, like for me, it's only good for one thing.

And that's, I started replacing CSVs, like comma separated value files with TSVs.

And the idea is like, you could have a CSV and some of those columns could have commas in them.

I mean, it could be, you know, last name, comma, first name as one of the columns, right?

And so now you have to like escape it out and do all sorts of craziness, right?

But nobody should have a tab.

Like the tab character is like should not exist in my opinion.

And so it's easy for me to just kill all the tabs, like replace tabs to spaces and all of my data.

And then use a tab separated file and just know that there's not going to be any weirdness because the actual data isn't going to have tabs in it. So for that it's good. The tab character has like one purpose and it's that. But when I see source code with tabs in it, I don't know it just drives me up the wall, especially open source projects. I just, I don't know why they do that. It just drives me crazy.

So that's my, that's my tabs versus spaces rant. Use spaces, please, for the love of God.

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