Interesting take. I prefer spaces because each piece of code that I see with tabs has an implicit tabsize you really need to have if you don’t want the code to look ugly - especially if the person has been mixing tabs and spaces - and they usually do. Sometimes unadvertently.
When you remove all tabs at least everyone is on the same page.
To the actual problem raised by the article:
I have ADHD. Two spaces per indent makes it damn near impossible for me to scan code. My brain gets too distracted by the visual noise. Someone who’s visually impaired might bump their font size up really large, and need to scale up or down the amount of space per indent. Someone might just prefer it because…
I wonder if it could be possible to adjust the “indent number of spaces you see” in code editors. Code editors are able to figure out what are indents and what are not, so in theory it should be possible. Perhaps that would be an idea for a new feature?
I do not get why it would work in that case. I assume the scenario is someone with a bike coming, doing theft, then leaving with the same bike.
Therefore there will be a period without bike, then a period with bike, then a period without bike again.
Let’s assume there is no bike on the particular moment viewed. How do you know whether it occured before or after the theft? If you make the wrong decision, you get stuck on an endless binary search… Unless you take note at each timestamp where you made the decision, draw a tree of timestamps, and go back the tree if your search is fruitless but that’s much more complicated than what this post says.