Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tehjoker 583 days ago
tabs are not great in Python because they can hide spaces, and that causes the code to break. in other code? i guess tabs are nicer because people can size them as they like on their devices.
2 comments

I use tabs in python and it works fine, I just enable "show whitespace" in my editor.
> i guess tabs are nicer because people can size them as they like on their devices

This is the only case that has me thinking that tabs are an actual solution to a relatively uncommon problem.

I recall an anecdote about someone’s colleague whose eyesight was going bad, which required them to use a huge font size to the point that the width of the screen could fit just one or two words. Two spaces is less convenient than one tab when the text editor can be configured to render the tab as a one-character-width space.

(That’s the “admittedly niche situation” I mentioned initially. I call it “niche” but I’d still hope most teams would be accommodating for such a situation.)