Grabbing some Clojure code because it's nearest to hand.

Look here: https://github.com/clojure/clojure/blob/master/src/clj/cloju...

I want the bindings being declared within that let to line up with one another. the first one immediately follows "(let [" so I need the rest to be indented six characters past where the let was originally indented. Six, not N times whatever the tab width happens to be in whichever editor someone's looking at the code in. This is the problem with tabs.

> I want

Which is actually the problem gofmt solves.

The desire to express your individual preference through the way code is formatted is an issue not a feature.

The code may be read, maintained and handled by many other individuals during the life of the code, and gofmt is an attempt to provide an incredibly high degree of consistency in the way that the code is formatted to improve those things.

The Go way is simplicity, readability, maintainability.

Once you accept that consistency in formatting is important and a good thing to strive for, the only question is spaces vs tabs. But spaces is a highly opinionated option as the number of spaces used for indentation has to be uniform, whereas tabs allows for each individual to configure their editing tool to permit a degree of individual preference that does not sacrifice any of the consistency.

Tabs have the advantage, please configure your editor to suit your preference and not the code.

The way people solve that is tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment. In my opinion this is a terrible compromise as mixing tabs and spaces is sacrilegious.

There is nothing wrong with mixing tabs and spaces. It works great.

Provided everyone use the same tab width :)

Nope, works regardless of tabwidth; that's the point. Tabs for indent (these change size with tabwidth), spaces for alignment (these don't change so things stay aligned).

Oh, you're right. I should have tried it before commenting :)

Until Python. Then it doesn't.

tabs for indent, spaces for alignment works great with Python.

What's a compromise about it? Alignment and indentation are different semantic things, so it makes perfect sense to mix them.

I'm not sure if there's an "issue" with tabs, but I have to agree that I pretty much never come across tabs in any of the languages I use regularly and find it jarring when I do so despite the obvious theoretical benefit of flexible tab widths enabling user preference.

I can't come up with a particularly good reason for it, but I'm so used to spaces at this point that tabs feel very wrong.

If anyone else has a good explanation I'd love to hear it.

> What issues have you seen with regards to using tabs?

How does a team adopt a standard regarding line length if their code base uses tabs and the team members specify different tab widths in their editors?

In my experience, devs that prefer tabs over spaces have a tendency to be unconcerned about line lengths, and their lines of code can become annoyingly long.

For example, the most popular Go project at GitHub[1] is Docker. Docker's code base contains Go files with lines of code that are hundreds of columns wide.[2] Gross. ;-)

[1] https://github.com/search?l=Go&q=stars%3A%3E0&type=Repositor...

[2] https://github.com/dotcloud/docker/blob/master/api/client/co...

Often different editors on a project (hell, even between computers for the same user) may display the same file different ways, and you almost always end up with weird mixes of spaces/tabs when indenting things (especially if you're super picky like I can be and really, really care about things lining up).

Simply having the editor expand tabs (to whatever people agreed on, usually 4 for C/C++ that I've seen) and save spaces, always, makes life simpler.

EDIT:

See Grandpa Zawinski's post on same: http://www.jwz.org/doc/tabs-vs-spaces.html

I hate that Zawinsky post. At the top, he says "I'm trying to avoid espousing my personal religion here, I just thought it would be good to try and explain the various sects." At the bottom, after thoroughly missing the point about semantic indentation, he says "So go forth and untabify!"