David Robinson used the data from the 28,657 people who self-selected to take the Stack Overflow survey to investigate the relationship between programmer pay and the conventions of using either tabs or spaces to mark indents, and found a persistent, significant correlation between using spaces and bringing home higher pay.

http://boingboing.net

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"The truth is incontrovertible.
malice may attack it,
ignorance may deride it,
but in the end,
there it is." -Sir Winston Churchill

Interesting. I wonder how many of the space-bar users are paid hourly, and get paid extra money wearing out their space bar when a simple tab would do.

Slightly guilty of that here, although our corporate coding style bans tabs anyway.

I like how tabs make parsing for pretty printers and other utilities so much easier, and resetting a tab to new sizes on the fly.

I find it convenient to use spaces when you specifically want more separation, but still have a fondness for tabs as the leftmost line indenters.

Tabs might not be so bad if they were a unique, but unobtrusive printable character. And they can be, on screen with any editor more modern than vi, but that pretty much sets the bar for where standards are born.

Maybe editors could adapt to a more modern standard, with the default being tabs for indent and space for everything after the first non-tab character.

On a print-out, nobody "chars" (accidentally punned that as I meant to say "cares").

Tabs send spaces in my IDE and can be set to whatever space number you choose. Pointless.

To be fair I used spaces before more modern IDEs made the entire topic pointless. I think this results of this probably reflect experience. Those of us who remember the days when it mattered and/or are stuck in old habits have been around the block and therefore are probably making more money.

Also... lol at banning tabs. I do set the space count though for tabs so all indents are the same for my whole team. Without that, the OCD tendency for most developers kicks in and results in a whole hell of a lot of wasted time in formatting wars.

In my case, code doesn't live and die within one IDE. It has to be compatible with at least 4 different tools that parse it in a mostly script-driven flow, and sometimes tabs pass hiccups downstream into one tool or another for various reasons.

Unix makefiles are notorious tab requirers.

Some googling turned up one editor with a default of replacing tabs with spaces, but lets you hit Ctrl-Tab if you really want to insert a tab char.

Tool incompatibilities aside, I'd still prefer tabs on the LHS side, spaces everywhere else.

One thing I didn't see is any attempt to correlate for age/experience.I'm guessing older programmers who have worked before all these great IDEs internalized using spaces, and we do demand higher salaries.


-------------------------
"The truth is incontrovertible.
malice may attack it,
ignorance may deride it,
but in the end,
there it is." -Sir Winston Churchill