The new rule for indentation and alignment: use tabs for achieving an indentation level, spaces for character alignment within an indentation level.
Christopher Bowns (and independently Peter Hosey)
The arguments make total sense to me. Here’s hoping for better IDE support in the future. Unfortunately, (though interestingly), according to Steve Yegge, indentation is very hard:
I would have been publishing this article at least a month ago if it weren’t for indentation. No, six weeks, mininum.
See, I thought that since I had gone to all the thousands of lines of effort to produce a strongly-typed AST (abstract syntax tree) for JavaScript, it should therefore be really easy to do indentation. The AST tells me exactly what the syntax is at any given point in the buffer, so how hard could it be?
It turns out to be, oh, about fifty times harder than incremental parsing. Surprise!
Here’s a forward-looking (somewhat contrary) opinion,
Soft-wrapped code (leaving a long line long, and letting the IDE handle the spacing) also appears to be the direction that Apple are heading and they tend to drag a lot of Mac programmers along in their wake.