Mastodawn

@elasticsoul @pluralistic Bets that the seniors start not signing off on code they aren't positive really works, with vague comments like "Overly complex, please simplify." or "Insufficient error checking. Please improve."?

RealGene ☣️Mar 14

@tknarr @elasticsoul @pluralistic
Start with where it puts the curly braces, and tab vs. space indents.

@RealGene @elasticsoul @pluralistic Yes on the first. Using tabs for indentation is an automatic "Fire this person." offense for me. Visual space should always match number of characters.

@tknarr I use tabs because I want $number_of_chars = $levels_of_indentation, with easy single-operation increase/decrease of level of indentation.

@developing_agent And when indentation isn't an even multiple of tabs, as when aligning a multi-line expression in an assignment?

@tknarr Because this *isn't* a structural construct (like if/for/etc) I indent up to the level of indentation of that block, then if I *really* need to make things align I fill in the remaining space with spaces. (tabs, if I don't)

This ensures that the block as a whole still indents/unindents correctly with tabs. I am never, ever going to adjust the level of indent of *part* of an expression in this way, so the use of spaces for intra-block expression alignment padding doesn't matter.

@developing_agent That works fine, until someone edits a line with tabs and then spaces, and indents using a tab so now the line has mixed leading tabs/spaces. You can't see them, but as soon as you change tab width those spaces mess things up all over again. I dealt with a codebase that had exactly that, because of the mix of people and editors in use, and it was enough of a nightmare that the entire team agreed to stop work and reformat to spaces-only indentation.

@tknarr One of the reasons I near-universally use tabs for indents everywhere. being within 3 characters of perfectly aligned is good enough.

Todd Knarr

@developing_agent Ragged indentation, ugh.