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Comment by saghul | Hacker News Reader

I seem to remember they used to indent Python code with 2 spaces. Glad to see it's 4 now.

I liked the look of 2 spaces tbh. Code had a certain „compact“ feeling to it combined with the 80 column limit.

For an even better feeling, combine 2 spaces with a more sensible line length. Why does the Google Python style guide allow only 80 columns and 4 spaces, but the Java style guide allows 100 columns and 2 spaces? Python may be simpler than Java, but the difference feels too large IMO, and it’s time to get rid of old TTY vestiges and embrace the larger screens.

When dealing with screen splits, max line length is important. If I have my screen split vertically, I can't display more than 90 characters per line without having to horizontally scroll or deal with soft wrapping even with a large screen. If I'm resolving conflicts using a 3 way vertical split with diff3, having a shorter line length is even more important.

No, anything above 80 characters per line doesn’t fit two documents on the screen at the same time. Not everyone codes with a font size of 10.

This depends on your font size and on your screen size. I can manage 230 columns with 14px Consolas on a 1080p screen, which is plenty for two 100-column documents, and almost enough for 120-column. And even if it won’t fully fit, most lines don’t reach the length limit, and for the remaining ones, in a two-file scenario, you could enable the soft word wrap feature of your editor, or just cut them off and scroll a little when absolutely necessary.

Fwiw, I didn’t care about any of this until I worked with a visually-impaired programmer.

In fact, a better article would have been to try and predict the eye powers of a programmer based on their formatting choices.

Java is much more verbose than python, lines get a lot longer.

Which is why I use 3. I noticed 4 was easier to read, but was too bloated, so why not 3? Is there some specific reason why they want even numbers? 3 seems so right to me.

Edit: Did someone seriously downvote me for how many spaces I indent with? Funniest downvote I've gotten so far.

I am pretty sure it used to be 2 spaces as well. Some public repositories such as https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/tree/master/tensorf... appear to use 2 space indent throughout.

I think all these will be covered by the "be consistent" clause, and whoever made the first commit decides the style.

It’s strange that some code in the style guide is still 2-space intended, though. For example, all the code from 3.19.3 until the end of the document.

I agree 4 spaces is preferable, but working in a code base with both conventions due to legacy code is hardly ideal.

It's still 2 spaces. This is the public version of the style guide, using 4.

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