Tabs Are For Indents, damnit!
Posted: Wed, 4 January 2006 | permalink | No comments
(Working Title: "Light up the crack pipe boys, thinkin' time's over!")
A tab is a wonderful thing. It makes everything line up nicely. So what does YAML ("indentation is so critical to proper interpretation of YAML" -- from the YAML FAQ) do with them? It bans them. Apparently Guido (van Python) thinks the same way -- using the key meant for indenting to indent things is a crime against humanity.
And why is it such a heinous crime to use tabs, you ask? Because "they are treated differently by different editors and tools" . Where's the prohibition on using line endings, then? They're treated differently by editors and tools, too.
Broken tools exist, that's true, but we don't pander to them -- we either fix them, or insult the people using them until they switch to something that doesn't suck.
If tabs are criminal, why do we even bother to *have* a tab key, then? Just pry it off your keyboard and throw it out. It's obviously not useful for anything. Let us bang on our spacebars, and have endless flamewars about how many spaces a particular project should indent all it's code, instead of just using tabs consistently, and then setting your personal preference of tab stop width in your editor like the good lord intended.
I am so amazingly and deeply pissed off right now. Bloody religious zealots -- "I don't like something, so neither will you".
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