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Lol. That's like saying the Star War prequels are cool because they have C3PO in them.

But the Prequels ARE the best SW Movies by far. I <3 Binks

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-->|if (output != null)
-->|{
-->|-->|output.append("account_id").append('\t')->|-->|// comment about account_id
-->|-->|xxxxxx.append("submission_id").append('\t')-->|// comment about submission_id
-->|-->|xxxxxx.append("payment_method").append('\t');>|// comment about payment_method
-->|}


Space only to make code look pretty, operation-wise.

Problem is the comments no longer line up if I'm a weirdo who uses something other than 4-space tabs ;-). But, Yes! Spaces for making the code pretty, FTW! :)

-->|if (output != null)
-->|{
-->|-->|output.append("account_id").append('\t')xxxxxxx// comment about account_id
-->|-->|xxxxxx.append("submission_id").append('\t')xxxx// comment about submission_id
-->|-->|xxxxxx.append("payment_method").append('\t');xx// comment about payment_method
-->|}


You never have to worry about downloading a file and opening it up in an editor and having it looks like awful nonsense. Considering that almost any text editor or IDE one would use for coding allows you to set Tab Space by filetype, workspace, user, or application wide, it can be super consistent.

Though honestly, it's whatever your team decides, I'm a Clean Coder and that's the law I live by.

The wonderful thing about using tabs for indenting and spaces for aligning (or making code pretty) is that it doesn't matter what editor you open it up in, it will look pretty and match your preferred indent size (as long as you are using a fixed width font, variable width font users are just wrong, and they deserve to look at ugly, slightly misaligned code all day long).

My example opened in an editor that has tabs set to 6-spaces wide:
---->|if (output != null)
---->|{
---->|---->|output.append("account_id").append('\t')xxxxxxx// comment about account_id
---->|---->|xxxxxx.append("submission_id").append('\t')xxxx// comment about submission_id
---->|---->|xxxxxx.append("payment_method").append('\t');xx// comment about payment_method
---->|}


But yes, above all stick to your team's coding standards, please!

Edit: are you a python guy? I suspect you may be...

I wasn't familiar with that term, so I looked it up. Here's a concise overview:

Top 9 qualities of clean code

Boom.

Any respectable IDE had an automatic format hotkey. I mean, Visual Studio has it, so why would any respectable IDE not have it as well?

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Why what? Not sure what the question is? Why 2 spaces? Just the convention adopted by the community at large, and if you're contributing to any open source project that's Ruby based you have to abide.

The big point of tabs and spaces, IMO, isn't which is better. It's about making pull requests legible. It's easier to review code that isn't mucked up with a bunch of committed lines that are just indentation changes.

This is why EditorConfig works well for open source projects, because it enforces everyone working on it to adopt the conventions of the project, rather than each individual's conventions.