Interesting language comparison article [OT]

[Unknown W. Brackets]

How in the world can you write code efficiently with a mouse?  If I had 
to use my mouse with any sort of frequency, it would probably halve my 
efficiency right there.  Then again, I've gotten comments about my speed 
before.

I did a lot of programming in DOS.  It's all about knowing your 
keyboard.  I don't even have to worry about saving anymore, it's a 
knee-jerk reaction - I just hit Alt-F-S every then and again like some 
people breathe.  Do you use your mouse for that too?

And even back then, there were editors that handled tabs well - but none 
that handled italics.  It's not that hard to get right, some people just 
don't try anymore these days.

-[Unknown]


> Unknown W. Brackets wrote:
>> Ah, yes, that's a good point as well.  I'm very careful to only use 
>> reasonable-quality editors, such as Visual Studio (which actually 
>> auto-corrects this issue and clears lines that are just whitespace if 
>> you don't type anything on them.)
> 
> This is why I said it's kind of a high level concept. Too many 
> complicated tasks to take care of.
> The low cohesion principle says that hard-wired tab character should be 
> removed because putting it in ascii code makes things way too 
> complicated, when they should be very simple!
> 
> Tabs are not elementary; spaces are.
> 
>>
>> And, another point about tabs is that it makes it a lot easier to 
>> navigate code with the carrot.  I always assume people who hate hard 
>> tabs must not like arrow keys or something....
> 
> You know .. I wasn't there (where "there" refers to the whole computer 
> scene) before mice & guis.
> I generally think that arrow keys are not the way to go for browsing 
> text. Just use a mouse!
> 
>>
>> -[Unknown]
>>
>>
>>> Unknown W. Brackets wrote:
>>>
>>>> That's only because they are used inconsistently.  The general rule 
>>>> is that tabs should never be used after a non-tab character on a 
>>>> line. Bam, instant portability and everyone gets their own tab size.
>>>
>>>
>>> That's a good rule, but you also need to make sure that lines with 
>>> tab indentation aren't being mixed with lines with space indentation. 
>>> Most editors don't enforce this, but it ought to be solvable. The 
>>> problem with tabs might simply be that so many text editors don't 
>>> handle them correctly.