[zyb09]

I thought these two were pretty good:

“Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.” — Linus Torvalds

That's how I always feel when people have lengthy discussions about spaces vs tabs. Good truth coming from the man himself.

“Sufficiently advanced trolling is indistinguishable from thought leadership.”

Kinda scary true, when you see how some online communities, that started mostly as trolling, became real idiologys over time.

[hyperpallium]

Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious. Brooks

[tome]

Linus's quotation is similar to Wadler's law:

> In any language design, the total time spent discussing a feature in this list is proportional to two raised to the power of its position.

> 0. Semantics

> 1. Syntax

> 2. Lexical syntax

> 3. Lexical syntax of comments

http://wiki.c2.com/?WadlersLaw

[jwdunne]

And on that, I believe Linus uses 8-wide tabs. You are, apparently, doing it wrong if that causes problems.

[falcolas]

Given the ease with which editors resize tabs, and given the problems caused by excessively nested code: seems reasonable.

[jwdunne]

I agree. I use spaces and 2 to 4 depending on typical language style but even then heavy nesting is obvious.

I have a project full of essentially 'if (true) return true; else return false;'. Sometimes heavily nested. It's just not necessary.

Guard-style returns go a long way but a long column of those may mask deeper problems of structure. I don't mean inheritance-polymorphism no-ifs but rather your code isn't dumb enough and perhaps your data isn't smart enough.

[dmckeon]

4. Format of whitespace