I used to put two spaces after sentences because people told me it is the correct thing to do. Now I put one space after a sentence because different people told me it is the correct thing to do. When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

Bravo! I like your subtle sense of humor - i.e. not so subtle that it goes right over my head, but barely.

The humor flew right over my head. Care to explain?

I'm beginning to doubt if there was any humor there in the first place.

> When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

I mean if it had been a French city I could say that a pun about French Spacing is there in the joke. But Rome isn't a French city. So still very confused if and what the joke is.

French Spacing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sentence_spacing#Fr...

My apology for a slow response, but I took the phrase 'when in Rome...' to be a reference to the scripto continua style seen on Roman monuments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua

thanks for the reply!

For years, I kept my wifi with the passphrase “This is my passphrase. There are many like it, but this one is mine.” Without the quotes of course. With two spaces after the period.

At this point I am not going to overcome forty years of muscle memory. I assume whatever tool is doing the rendering will make things right according to the current convention.

Hopefully two spaces after /each/ period!

> When in Rome, do as the Romans do

IOVMEANISOVLDRITELIKEDIS?

“Vote with your fingers, space stuff however you want.”

I believe this is why I see an increasing lack of punctuation or capitalization in online discourse.

I’m told it’s because the period is considered passive-aggressive. I assume it’s too formal final; maybe The Kids These Days hold out hope that a sentence might not really be over? At any rate whoever got the McDonald’s account embraces it wholeheartedly.

Only when sending a one-sentence text, where the beginning and end of the sentence are clearly the bounds of the text itself. You see periods still between sentences of multi-sentence texts. Sometimes other markers are used like ellipsis or emoji.

I really genuinely like this change for orthography. The feel & sound of spoken language is highly sensitive to the context and formality: you talk differently giving a speech than you do at dinner with your family etc. It's cool that we're adapting the written forms to more completely express the full range of formality that we actually produce written language in now.

The details of orthography are all just convention and tradition anyway. As much as it pains prescriptivists and peaked-in-high-school wellactually pedants the true language is the spoken and writing is merely a tool we use to represent it. These additions make writing a more complete & capable representation.

And from a more CS view it's cool too. We've hijacked sometimes-redundant punctuation to convey nuances of tone and intent. Essentially increasing the "bandwidth" of writing.

Similarly for bullet points – no full stop required.

You would be surprised by how often people ignore those on their verbal discourse.

> Vote with your fingers, space stuff however you want.

I prefer tabs to spaces myself.

Off the island with ya.

Yes, but do your tabs indent by two, four or eight spaces?

Fibonacci tab stops!

- https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/3m6yhd/fibonacci_ind...

- https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/171031/indent-y...

My tabs insert spaces.

I once jokingly suggested a compromise of 3 spaces, then got curious. Turns out I like it more than 2 or 4, and now use it for all my personal stuff.

I've seen house programming styles that mandate a tab is 3 spaces, as well as 5. Personally, I have no dog in this fight at all. I'll follow whatever the house style is.

Just enough spaces to reach the next tab stop.

No, no. Set your tab stops to one space. Problem solved.

And so it begins...