As the commenter above you already said, this is not a bad thing. People on _hacker_news should be able to understand that being able to define the ==/!= operators on something does not automatically mean that you can define < and >.

That's the entire point of tabs. One tab means one indentation level and you as the user can decide how that's displayed. Spaces forces everyone to see the code exactly as whoever decided on his favourite width and that is in the best case "only" annoying to people with different preferences and in the worst case actively hurtful to people with disabilities.

The only argument spaces people ever have is "some of my colleagues are too stupid to properly indent with tabs and align with spaces" and that is trivially fixed by either of those:

- don't use alignment, it's useless anyway

- get better coworkers

- educate your coworkers

- use commit hooks to check wrong usage

So basically there is no argument left on the spaces side at all^[1]. Meanwhile tabs semantically mean "one indentation level", take up less bytes, and most importantly allow everyone to have their own preferences without affecting other people. And honestly I am insanely baffled by how many people don't get the importance of that last part. Accessibility like that costs you nothing but means the world to other people, similarly how we have ramps at public buildings for the elder, wheelchair users, strollers, and so on. And not to mention the fact that there are a lot of autistic people in programming, which often have a harder time dealing with things not being as they want them to be. Is there any reason to choose an objectively inferior method and force that onto those demographics just because "muh alignment"?

[1] Okay fine, there is one: "Tools I don't own don't display tabs as I want them, for example GitHub with their retarded default of 8". But first of all you can change that if you're logged in and second you're supposed to use your IDE and not a web interface...

Fully agree with you on that, the less data they have, the better.

Since when is wearing smart watches only for autists?

Because most scientists are only using programming as a tool and don't care one bit about it beyond what they need it to do. They don't go looking for new tools all the time, they just ask their supervisor or colleague and then by default/network effects you get Python, Fortran, or C"++". You need a killer argument to convince them to do anything new. To most of them suggesting a new language is like suggesting to use a hammer of a different color to a smith - pointless. With enough time and effort you can certainly convince people, but even then it's hard. It took me years to convince even just one person to use matplotlib instead of gnuplot when I was working in academia. You can obviously put that on my lack of social skills, but still.

The only difference is that on US keyboards the enter key is smaller and left shift is larger, leading to the "\" key being moved one down and one left on a German keyboard (and also being duplicated to left of z (German label: y)). So even if you move from a physical US keyboard to a physical German one while keeping the US layout, it's literally just one key where you'd have to retrain your hand. And for people that have learned to type on a German keyboard this is not a problem at all since they have never typed on a physical US one and using a different mapping means a training period anyway.

Source: German who mapped his keyboard to US (+ some AltGr modifiers for the German characters I need).

I don't know about the other European layouts, but I assume it's somewhat similar for them too.

Normally I'd agree with you on that the tyranny of the minority is a bad thing, but sometimes the minority actually has a point and this is one of the cases where the minority is _objectively_ correct and letting the majority decide would end up in a complete dystopia. Democracy only works if everyone is informed (and able to think logically/critically, not influenced (either by force or by salary), etc.) and in this case the 99% simply do not have any clue on the effects of this being implemented (nor do they care). This entire proposal is pure orwellian shit.

Almost [1] every single student absolutely hates that notation in scripts. Bold is used to draw attention, it should not be abused as being part of the variable/type. Just use the proper symbol.

[1] And I'm only saying "almost" to account for the possibility of there being like 5 super weird people on this planet that think otherwise. I don't know a single person who thinks this is a good idea, even the professors writing their scripts like that think it's stupid and are only doing it due to some nonsense fear of it otherwise not printing correctly due to one single bad experience with a shitty printer in 1950. Or maybe there's some other historical reason for this, but in 2023 I'd classify not using the better notation as malicious.

The limit on what constitutes a reasonable line length is a bit subjective but I'd say that well written code rarely goes above ~120 or so. Depends a bit on the language, some just have more boilerplate than others. But instead of making that a hard limit I'd warn above that number so actual people can decide if it makes sense there or if a rewrite is in order. Auto-formatting is great and all, but ultimately a human should have the last decision.

Though if you force me to pick a value, then it's 4 because that's the sanest choice for like 95-99.9% of all people.