Yesterday, I shared some spicy takes. A few were particularly controversial—most notably, that I correct Gif the correct way (with a soft G)—but I also got a lot of emails asking me to elaborate on a few of them.
Today, I wanted to talk about how tabs are objectively better than spaces. This won’t take long.
Tabs let you define how big you want each indent to be, and spaces do not.
I think that there might be a fundamental missunderstanding here: I’m not saying that we shouldn’t use tabs to accomodate people with disabilities, I’m saying that better editor features seems like a better “solution” to the problem.
In the abscence of editor improvements I agree that it makes sense to use tabs to accomodate disabilities, I just don’t think that it will catch on that mutch. I don’t think that spaces (imo) being slightly better is a good reason to not accomodate dissabilities by using tabs right now, but I do hope there is a more editor oriented solution some day because I think it would propably be better both for people with visual disabilities and without.
Being in a slightly argumentative mood might have led me down towards validating this false dicotomy between editors and tabs, and I apologize for wasting both our time because of this.
You do have a point that I personally might have more influence over if a given project has spaces or tabs than if better editor features are made, but I think that there can be a point to having the poor support for programming that is apparently offered by screen readers to take some place in the discussion as well since that is a potentially more important piece of the puzzle.
I can’t imagine that there is much of a point to keep replying after this so I think I’ll leave it here.
I think that there might be a fundamental missunderstanding here: I’m not saying that we shouldn’t use tabs to accomodate people with disabilities, I’m saying that better editor features seems like a better “solution” to the problem.
In the abscence of editor improvements I agree that it makes sense to use tabs to accomodate disabilities, I just don’t think that it will catch on that mutch. I don’t think that spaces (imo) being slightly better is a good reason to not accomodate dissabilities by using tabs right now, but I do hope there is a more editor oriented solution some day because I think it would propably be better both for people with visual disabilities and without.
Being in a slightly argumentative mood might have led me down towards validating this false dicotomy between editors and tabs, and I apologize for wasting both our time because of this.
You do have a point that I personally might have more influence over if a given project has spaces or tabs than if better editor features are made, but I think that there can be a point to having the poor support for programming that is apparently offered by screen readers to take some place in the discussion as well since that is a potentially more important piece of the puzzle.
I can’t imagine that there is much of a point to keep replying after this so I think I’ll leave it here.