[hn_throwaway_99]

Not going to get into the details of the argument (there is a reason tabs vs spaces is considered the prototypical "religious war"), but I do strongly disagree with the way it was argued, and I felt the need to comment because I so frequently see this type of discourse and find it very disheartening. It's what I usually call the "If you disagree with me you want to kill puppies" (or, in this case, "if you disagree with me you hate blind people") form of argument. The author really isn't inviting people to challenge his thinking with his final sentence - I feel like he's instead trying to flat out invalidate other opinions by emphasizing how callous you must be to have them.

FWIW, I believe there are other opinions that are at least worthy of consideration, but I think other commenters have made those points as well.

[em-bee]

so what are your counterarguments then?

in your company code that only a known set of people need to work with, you can choose whatever suits the group.

but in a public project, the argument that tabs help visually impaired coders is a serious point that is hard to refute.

[nexuist]

Even in private company code, there may well come a day when a vision impaired person is hired and has to work on the codebase. Even though the odds are low, you'd be setting yourself up for long term success if you make the switch now. Not saying that you should, just that it's always worth considering who will end up maintaining your code after you finish working on it.

[WoahNoun]

See for example this blog post:

https://blog.aboutamazon.com/working-at-amazon/blind-since-b...

[em-bee]

in a company it is still possible to convert the code at the point when that employee joins.

for a FOSS project, the decision to join may well depend on the readability of the code, at which point it is already to late to solve the problem, because the potential developer already moved on.

[em-bee]

>> The argument that a visually impaired coder doesn't already have an IDE that can detect spaces used for indentation automatically is impossible to refute.

this reply was killed (probably for good reason) but i want to respond anyways:

there are no IDEs for visually impaired developers. at least i could not find any. all i found was workarounds and extensions. so that supposedly impossible to refute point is hereby refuted.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/codetalk-rethi...

sure it is possible to add such features but the market for this is by no means mature, and it is not a given that a developer will have these tools available for their use.

[kazinator]

It's not clear that tabs are the best technical solution. For starters, why can't there be a text editor (or text editor feature) of rendering the leading spaces of a line with a flexible size, so that the data itself doesn't have to be massaged to achieve the effect?

If some visually impaired people insist that 80 column punched cards are the best for them, do we switch to that? Or maybe we should all work with Braille or Morse Code? I'm not convinced by lowest-common-denominator arguments. Suppose that no code representation method suits every possible programming minority; do we give up and not code at all?

Here is a counterargument: I'm not switching to idiotic tabs even if doing so saves puppies from being drowned. Not caring is a perfectly valid argument.

[em-bee]

very good point. there is certainly room for improvement. a lot of room actually.

im fact it irks me every time if i have to change the indentation of code already written just because i changed the nesting depth. it causes changes in lines of code that haven't actually changed, and messes up the diff as well as things like git blame...

we can imagine a solution by looking at lisp for example. its syntax makes it possible to store the code without any indentation at all. in fact even without any linebreaks (let's ignore comments for now) and rely entirely on an editor to present the code in a readable format.

this should be possible with other languages too. especially if we design them with that goal in mind.

[RomanBob]

well said. so many of these crippleocracy arguments are cropping up these days, with the poster virtue signalling.

[diehunde]

I wouldn't say hate. Just that you don't care about their coding needs.

[some1else]

What is the counter-argument?