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Comment by dvfjsdhgfv | Hacker News Reader

> Indent 2 spaces

It's interesting how quickly the 2-space indent became the new norm

I'm very curious about why. In 8-space tab sizes, you have to very, very carefully think about what you're fitting on that 80-col line after having in most cases, already removed 10% of your column space. A lot of C resulted in single character variable names and abbreviations that sacrificed immediate readability, but with domain knowledge that gets resolved with time.

On the flip side of things, you have developers who universally write 240+ col lines in HTML and don't know what a punched card is.

…I'm not seeing a strong argument for either in your response.

All Google style guides use two spaces.

not the python one! https://google.github.io/styleguide/pyguide.html

anything other than 4 spaces for python look out of place for me.

I've seen a lot of Python from Google using two spaces, which I find very hard to read. Many of the samples here use two-space indentation: https://github.com/google/google-api-python-client/blob/mast...

Here's a specific example: https://github.com/google/google-api-python-client/blob/mast...

This is either outdated or only for the public version of the guide: the internal guide, and all our python code, has 2-spaces indents.

Meanwhile, the rest of the Python world probably follows PEP8, which uses 4 spaces.

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#indentation

Yeah, I'm not following that one. 2-space tabs are visually difficult.

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