It got me thinking: After decades of writing code, how is it that we still haven’t reached a consensus on the tabs vs. spaces debate? The list is based on official language style guides where available, or well-established third-party guides where not. The result is a relatively comprehensive snapshot of current best practices:Language Default indentation References Ada Spaces (3) 1 Ansible (follows YAML) Spaces (2) 1 Apex Spaces (4) 1 Assembly (x86, ARM) Tabs (8) 1 2 Befunge Spatial 1 Brainfuck None 1 C / C++ Tabs or Spaces (2, 4, 8) 1 2 C# Spaces (4) 1 Clojure Spaces (2) 1 COBOL Spaces (4) 1 Cow None 1 Crystal Spaces (2) 1 CSS Spaces (2) 1 Dart Spaces (2) 1 2 Delphi Spaces (2) 1 Elixir Spaces (2) 1 Erlang Spaces (4) 1 F# Spaces (4) 1 Fortran Spaces (2 or 4) 1 Gherkin (Cucumber) Spaces (2) 1 Go Tabs (4) 1 Groovy Spaces (4) 1 Hack Spaces (2) 1 Hare Tabs (8) 1 Haskell Spaces (2 or 4) 1 HTML Spaces (2) 1 INTERCAL None 1 Java Spaces (2 or 4) 1 2 JavaScript Spaces (2) 1 JSFuck None 1 JSON Spaces (2) 1 Julia Spaces (4) 1 Kotlin Spaces (4) 1 Less Spaces (2) 1 Lisp (Common Lisp) Spaces (2) 1 LOLCODE Tabs 1 Lua Spaces (2) 1 Makefile Tabs (8) 1 Malbolge None 1 Markdown Spaces (2 or 4) 1 MATLAB Spaces (3 or 4) 1 Nim Spaces (2) 1 Objective-C Spaces (2) 1 2 OCaml Spaces (2) 1 Odin Tabs (4) 1 Perl Spaces (4) 1 PHP Spaces (4) 1 Piet None 1 Prolog Spaces (2 or 4) 1 Python Spaces (4) 1 R Spaces (2 or 4) 1 ReScript Spaces (2) 1 Ruby Spaces (2) 1 Rust Spaces (4) 1 Scala Spaces (2 or 4) 1 Scheme Spaces (2) 1 SCSS/Sass Spaces (2) 1 Shakespeare Spaces 1 Shell (Bash) Spaces (4) 1 Solidity Spaces (4) 1 SQL Spaces (2 or 4) 1 Swift Spaces (2 or 4) 1 2 Terraform Spaces (2) 1 TOML Spaces (2) 1 TypeScript Spaces (4) 1 VB.NET Spaces (4) 1 Verilog Spaces (4) 1 VHDL Spaces (2 or 4) 1 Whitespace Spaces 1 XML Spaces (2) 1 YAML Spaces (2) 1 Zig Spaces (4) 1 2Roughly 90% of mainstream programming languages and markup formats adopt spaces as the preferred method of indentation. In much the same way, the majority of developers and style guides have come to favor spaces over tabs, suggesting that, for most practical purposes, the debate has largely been settled. Spaces war is over, and that spaces have emerged victorious.