I'd imagine it's because people who use spaces are either further in their career in average (because the modern programming ecosystem in general uses tabs so new devs are more likely to only know that) or they're just more serious about software development because the kind of person to die on that hill is also the kind of person who is very obsessive about other things as well.
Wait. Are tabs used more often in modern stuff? Almost everything I use does spaces and I'm not that new to programming. Been doing it for maybe 5 years. I use spaces in everything but Go.
Most text editors people use (like VSCode) generally automatically adjust tabs to be whatever the standard indent is for the project (and convert to spaces if it's necessary). As a result, indenting with tabs usually just works, and so most people just learn to do it that way. Also people are used to using tabs for indent from things like Word which they used before learning to write code. As a result, I've noticed most people use the tab key (even if their not technically "using tabs" every time they do it).
I use tabs because I prefer 4-space indents and others might prefer 2-space indentation or the gross and unacceptable 6-space indentation.
If more than one person is working on a code base, there will likely be more than one preference, and with tabs everyone gets to just set their own tab width.
Generally aligning stuff isn’t nice. But if you do, it’s tabs up to whatever level of indentation you’re at then spaces the rest of the way. So you wouldn’t have to assume a tab size. And the tabs and spaces have different semantic meaning (indent vs alignment) so mixing them makes sense. It's even built into Jetbrains IDEs, where it's called "Smart Tabs".
Although really just adding a level of indent is better than aligning.
This is a legit observation. However, I would argue that spaces needs a set indentation width anyway, so if tabs had a set indentation width that coders are expected to maintain when aligning code, it wouldn't make a difference. Enforcing that in practice may be different, but in theory it works.
It's OK, I replace all the tabs with spaces for uniformity. Tabs are stupid and they mess things up when I paste stuff. I like to watch the world burn.
Totally agree, all my { end up on the next line, 1st spot when starting a function, last character of the keyword when starting an if/for/... section. I even put the closing one on the same line when it's single line, else either at the end of the closing line (when changing really old code) or same indent.
So indenting varies a lot, which makes most 'new' programmers go mental.
while (my code)
{ I'll do it my way }
if (! liked)
{ toughen-up }
else
{ get used to it
multi-line can go both ways...
}
spaces: who want to be able to have accidental fractional indentation and so they can force anyone who may read their code in the future to see the indentation at the size that they intended.
tabs: who want consistent bug-resistant and logical formatting, and for any future reader to decided for themselves thier own personal best indentation size.
A possible explanation: people who want it their way at the expense of others are more likely to choose spaces, and are more likely to feel at home at a company that does exactly that in order to extract more profit from thier victi... customers.
So people who contribute to open source use spaces more.Thiss is probably because in a collaborative environment, you can't guarantee how tabs will look on all systems, and it may look horribly on some. An open source project is most likely to enforce a standard, and that standard kind of has to be spaces.
It makes me wonder what portion of the stack overflow survey is from people who aren't working on collaborative projects at work.
Is there any actual advantage to using spaces? I have seen similar posts for a while and as a tab user I don't understand why they are any better than just a tab
Tabs make more sense because that’s exactly what they’re for, indents. Ignoring how it looks, which makes more semantic sense for an indent, <indent character> or <space character><space character>? You wouldn’t use a bunch of spaces to indent a paragraph, so why would you use it to indent code?
I was pro tabs when I started out with software development. It just made sense, right? You press the key once, you get a single symbol, you have your indention, neat. And there is the argument that everyone can adjust their tab sizes, want it to be 2 spaces? 4? 6? Whatever? Awesome!
Then you write actual code and this perception changes. Tabs make a mess, developers often align both code and comments to make sense. That alignment only works at x-spaces and utterly breaks if you change tab width.
An example in C# with LINQ (just semi-random stuff):
var test = customers.Where(c => c.Deleted == false
&& c.Enabled
&& c.HasProducts()
&& blockedCustomers.Contains(c.Id) == false);
This kind of indention only works with spaces, not with tabs. And no, mixing tabs and spaces doesn't work (like some users claim, that you can indent with tabs and then do alignment with spaces.. nope, if you change tab with then your space alignment breaks).
Honestly, I don't care either way, I just use what my company uses and adapt. But till now it has always been spaces (even though I was team tabs in university) and now I actually prefer spaces as it just makes sense. It's consistent, it's easy, it works everywhere.
Btw. the Lemmy code editor is shit, trying to align this was trial and error for a minute :-/