2gooder
August 22nd, 2005, 10:12 PM
Hello everyone,
<rant>
I recently started learning Ruby so that I could use the Ruby on Rails platform. One of the first things I did was review the Ruby coding standards so that I didn't break the norm. One problem I had was the fact that it is considered good form to indent using 2 spaces rather than a tab. This doesn't sound like a big deal, but this actually really bothers me. If you are interested in my reasoning, I like tab indents becuase they allow the tab size to be set on a per developer basis, so anyone can have their indents what ever size they like and it doesn't affect anyone else. Also, this means more key strokes of the backspace key in most editors when you need to break out of an indentation. Most importantly though, this means I have to change the settings on my editor every time I move from Ruby to another language I write that uses tabs, like Java, C# and XML. It wouldn't be such a big deal for me to just write everything using tabs instead of spaces, but the Rails framework creates all of its code using spaces, so if I use tabs and then edit the code that Rails created everything just turns into a real mess.
So can anyone tell me why the Ruby people have decided on spaces?
</rant>
Thanks,
Simon
<rant>
I recently started learning Ruby so that I could use the Ruby on Rails platform. One of the first things I did was review the Ruby coding standards so that I didn't break the norm. One problem I had was the fact that it is considered good form to indent using 2 spaces rather than a tab. This doesn't sound like a big deal, but this actually really bothers me. If you are interested in my reasoning, I like tab indents becuase they allow the tab size to be set on a per developer basis, so anyone can have their indents what ever size they like and it doesn't affect anyone else. Also, this means more key strokes of the backspace key in most editors when you need to break out of an indentation. Most importantly though, this means I have to change the settings on my editor every time I move from Ruby to another language I write that uses tabs, like Java, C# and XML. It wouldn't be such a big deal for me to just write everything using tabs instead of spaces, but the Rails framework creates all of its code using spaces, so if I use tabs and then edit the code that Rails created everything just turns into a real mess.
So can anyone tell me why the Ruby people have decided on spaces?
</rant>
Thanks,
Simon