Burned 2 Saturdays on tabs vs spaces in my first Python class and my code still ran the same

Grant Lewis · 2026-10-02T19:45:03.972056+00:00

So my beginner Python group at the library in Boise split into two camps over indent style, and I let them drag me into it. I picked tabs because one guy swore it saved him keystrokes, then our TA ran my script and it broke 3 times with a TabError while his space version worked fine. I switched to 4 spaces and felt dumb for wasting 5 hours reading forum fights about it. What actually fixed my code was learning to keep my functions short, not the indent character. Now I just hit the tab key and let my editor swap it, took me 20 seconds to set up in VS Code. Did anyone else pick a side in this dumb war before they even knew what a loop was?

Vivisector

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Burned 2 Saturdays on tabs vs spaces in my first Python class and my code still ran the same | Coding For Beginners - Vivisector