More and more often you can hear the question from every programmer all over the world: it’s how avoid the indent of the lines while creating a programing code. It constantly rises up in the programing community. In many programming languages, indentation is simply needed to make reading the code easier, so even a regular person will have no hard timing trying to realize the content of the code. But there are some exceptions - for example, the language Python, - here indents are mandatory, they help the compiler to understand where the blocks of commands begin and end. And to compare it with C/CPP/Java languages, where you use brackets for the same purposes.
Some developers make indents with the help of spaces, and others - with tabs (usually this symbol is set with the TAB key). Here is an example of Python code written using spaces (one indent step - four spaces):
The forum for programmers ‘Stack Overflow’ decided to do the research which will help to find out actually how much the representatives of each technique earn. More than 28 thousand people took part in the survey and the results of the research were based on their answers.
So it turns out that 40.7 percent of the participants said they used tabulation, and 41.8 percent said they were up to using space key. The rest of respondents use both options. At the same time, the average salary for the tab users is around 43,750 dollars, and for those who prefer using space is about 59140.
The reason for such a difference remains unclear. There was the main suggestion why the salary difference is possible: the author of the research David Robinson first suggested that tabulation fans live in less affluent countries, but further analysis of the data disproved this theory, it was proved that the ratio between the salaries in this field is more or less preserved in different countries. Robinson concluded that, on average, the use of spaces in the writing the programing code instead of tabulation increases the salary by around 8.6 percent.
The image from Stack Overflow's Twitter.
"Analyze our raw data & find surprises like this: developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs. "
So may be it’s time for you to start clicking on ‘space’ more frequently.