>> Should you use the tab button or five spaces when you're indenting source code?<p>Five? What sort of freak uses five?<p>And you should use the tab button, with your editor set up to insert <i>four</i> spaces instead of tab characters. This way display is consistent across editors, platforms etc etc<p>I must say I'm surprised at the result for 'C' on there, as I've never worked with a C programmer that used tabs.
I wish more projects would start using this : <a href="http://editorconfig.org/" rel="nofollow">http://editorconfig.org/</a><p>I don't care whatever the original author of a project used, as long as my editor does the same automatically when I contribute.
C++ Developer - must admit I used to use spaces, then switched to tabs.<p>This was for several reasons - firstly - makefiles will not be parsed correctly if you start using spaces rather than tabs, so it's a good habit to get into to use them elsewhere to save headaches. Secondly, almost every developer I've met will want to use a different amount of spaces for indentation. When using tabs they can set whatever they want using the text editor or IDE of their choice.<p>This is my line of thinking anyway.
It's strange, that the white space in languages without "meaningful white space" has any impact after all.<p>Of course I like a blank line between blocks of more related functions, but I wonder why there is no standard for such things. Many text editors do the right step and auto-convert to your preferred spacing, but it's still strange there is no standard for it.
It would be interesting to see if there is a trend on the spaces / tabs per language statistics, and I would also be interested by the numbers of spaces per language.<p>e.g. I always use two spaces, but I mostly code in Ruby / JS / CoffeeScript. And that may influence my preference.