On 1/7/2014, 3:46 PM, Mike Hoye wrote:
2 v. 4 spaces: more on that shortly.
An update on the research: Earlier, I said "four spaces" flat out, based
on some conversations with researchers, but since then all the research
I've been able to track down seems to cite the same paper. That paper
says that two to four spaces of indentation results in better code
comprehension than zero (obvs.) or 6+ spaces.
That paper is here: http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/papers/Miara1983Program.pdf
It also says that as long as it's consistent, block style doesn't
matter, but that's not the most interesting thing here.
There are two things I've found while digging this stuff out that are
really, really cool.
First of all: Perceived efficiency and real efficiency aren't the same
thing at all. People asked to rate what codebase they found most
pleasant and efficient to work with, consistently rating 6 or more
spaces very higher than 2-4 spaces, but when you put those people in
front of an eye tracker and a stopwatch, what they perceive as best
isn't what actually works best.
It echoes this classic Ask Tog article from the 1989, about clicking
icons with mouse v. keyboard shortcuts - People who think the keyboard
is faster are measurably wrong, because their brains actually don't
remember the time it takes to recall a key sequence, instead of clicking
a button.
http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html
The other thing that's probably more important from a community
engagement or developer-migration perspective is that real complexity
and perceived complexity are also two entirely different things. A
dirt-simple program with crappy formatting, or even just a new codebase
in a format that's new to you, will be perceived as much more complex
and _become much harder to understand_ than a genuinely complicated
program with a clean, well-structured codebase.
Which is all to say that I think this is kind of important.
- mhoye
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