What is a big internal debate within a fandom or hobby you are a part of that outsiders probably wouldn't care about?

3 months ago by early_riser to c/asklemmy

In the Lord of the Rings fandom there's a persistent debate whether balrogs, or Durin's Bane specifically, have wings. The text in Fellowship is ambiguous whether what it is describing are literal wings or something else wing-like.

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Nemo 69 points 3 months ago

Are tabs worth two spaces or four?

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AndyMFK 78 points 3 months ago

That's the beauty of tabs, it can be whatever you want.

But the correct answer is 4

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naught101 21 points 3 months ago

I'm a spaces guy, but agree on the 4. A coder told me decades ago that 4 is better than 2 because if your code starts wrapping due to too many indents you should be refactoring it into functions anyway.

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Hudell 14 points 3 months ago

Spaces, in 2026? Why?

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naught101 14 points 3 months ago

In part, because it forces 2-space tab users to confront the indentation issue above

Also there are no drawbacks.. I still hit the tab key to indent (and shift tab to dedent). My editor does the rest.

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the_artic_one 16 points 3 months ago

The drawback to spaces is that people with vision issues or dyslexia lose the ability to make the code more readable in their IDE by adjusting tab size.

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naught101 5 points 3 months ago

I can't speak to dyslexia (but in would guess that 4 spaces is easier than 2?).

At my last job we had a default linter policy of 4 spaces across all languages (python, JS, rust, mostly). We also had a blind coder. He never mentioned it. I'd guess screen readers are capable of dealing with it these days?

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