about code quality and editors

content/why-mixing-tabs-and-spaces-is-a-big-deal.md

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+title = "Why Mixing Spaces and Tabs IS a Big Deal"
+date = 2016-12-15
+
+category = "code"
+
+[taxonomies]
+tags = ["tabs", "spaces", "clean code", "editors"]
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+
+Why something so small is actually a big deal.
+
+<!-- more -->
+
+Reading Reddit comments about [How terrible code gets written by perfectly
+sane people](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5gc871/how_terrible_code_gets_written_by_perfectly_sane/)
+when I read this comment:
+
+>>  spaces/tabs for indentation
+
+> Is this a joke? I've been programming professionally from 2008 and I've not
+> yet found an actual case where this was an actual problem. The code looks
+> the same on everyone's screen if you set tab length in the editor to same
+> as the amount of spaces in your indentation. It would take seconds to fix
+> this :) I've never seen a tabs vs spaces argument go anywhere. It's such a
+> dumb thing to complain about. Maybe because I'm young I don't have
+> experience of bad code editors of old days but it's 2016 now. It's not a
+> big deal anymore.
+
+Unfortunately, I lost the time to properly reply to this comment, but here it
+goes:
+
+No, it *isn't* a joke. If you've read [Clean Code](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3735293-clean-code?from_search=true),
+you'd see that, at some point, Uncle Bob mentions that there isn't an actual
+experiment about it, but his team personally found that a programmer that cares about
+consistency and follows coding standards are prone to write less buggy code.
+
+I get what he means: If someone cares about the small stuff,
+they also care about the big stuff. It doesn't mean that people that ignore
+coding standards (and the difference between using tabs and using spaces)
+doesn't care about the big stuff; but on my own experience in those 28
+years in the field proved the opposite: people who cared about
+"putting the code at the door" without worrying about following coding standards
+(and we can add tabs vs spaces here), proper code documentation,
+separation of concerns, a good level of abstraction, tend to write
+horrible/unmaintable code.
+
+*This* is why mixed spaces/tabs is bad: it means that whoever didn't care enough
+with something so small as the coding standard, probably didn't care
+about the bigger stuff. Their only worry was to deliever stuff, no matter
+what. "And no matter what" usually results in terrible code.
+
+So, while not an "actual problem", it is an indicator that something really
+terrible is going on. So, no, it isn't a joke and yes, it is a big deal. And
+it has absolutely nothing to do with "bad code editors", it's a problem with
+"bad coders".