[BBC] Programmers who use spaces 'paid more'

["Mr. Man-wai Chang" <toylet.toylet@gmail.com>]

Computer programmers who use spaces as part of their coding earn $15,370 
(£12,000) more per year than those who use tabs, a survey of developers 
has revealed.

Full story: <http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40302410>

The survey found the salary difference stretched across different 
languages, countries and experience levels.

The debate over whether it is better to use spaces or tabs to indent 
code has raged among programmers for years.

Indents act like paragraph markers and help define how programs work.

The result was "surprising," said David Robinson, data scientist at 
Stack Overflow which carried out the survey of 12,400 developers.

'Pepsi or Coke question'

... more ....

Whether tabs or spaces were used could have an impact, he said, when 
hand-written code was turned into working software. This process is 
handled by a separate program called an interpreter or compiler. Some of 
these can crash if they encounter something, such as a tab, when they 
were only expecting spaces.

Professional developers typically set up their coding editor to use 
either tabs or spaces to show the relationships between functional 
elements, he said. Code can get harder to read if viewed in an editor 
expecting tabs and getting spaces or vice versa.

-- 
   @~@   Remain silent! Drink, Blink, Stretch! Live long and prosper!!
  / v \  Simplicity is Beauty!
/( _ )\ May the Force and farces be with you!
   ^ ^   (x86_64 Ubuntu 9.10)  Linux 2.6.39.3
不借貸! 不詐騙! 不援交! 不打交! 不打劫! 不自殺! 請考慮綜援 (CSSA):
http://www.swd.gov.hk/tc/index/site_pubsvc/page_socsecu/sub_addressesa