Social Distancing in Code: Tabs Set to 8 Spaces
Description
A screenshot of a tweet from the user 'DevOps Dan' (@scripticles). The profile picture is a circular image of a yellow duckling. The tweet text reads: 'In the spirit of social distancing, I am now changing my tabs from four spaces to eight. #coronavirus #programming'. The hashtags are highlighted in blue. The humor comes from applying a major real-world public health concept, social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic, to a trivial and long-debated topic in software development: code indentation style (tabs vs. spaces, and the width of indentation). The joke is that increasing the visual space in a code editor is a meaningless gesture in the fight against a virus, but it hilariously connects to the pedantic details that programmers often care about. It's a perfect blend of a current event with a timeless developer in-joke
Comments
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My linter now enforces social distancing. Any PR with less than 8-space indentation is flagged as a 'high-density commit' and sent to quarantine
Moved the team to eight-space indents for code-level social distancing - git blame now tags me as patient zero for 12,347 “changed” lines
Next thing you know, Python developers will be claiming their significant whitespace was actually a public health measure all along
Ah yes, the pandemic-era solution to the eternal tabs vs spaces war: just double the spacing and call it 'social distancing for your code.' Next up: microservices so distributed they need their own VPN, and pair programming sessions conducted via carrier pigeon. Though I suppose if we're being consistent, we should also be sanitizing our git commits and maintaining six feet of separation between our nested callbacks
Eight spaces: the one config change that turns every merge commit into a social distancing exercise for your diffs
Switched to 8‑space indents for “social distancing”; YAML resigned, Python complained, and the only thing actually decoupled was git blame from meaningful history
Setting tabstop=8 for “social distancing” - the only policy that makes Makefiles happy, Prettier furious, and git blame utterly useless