You can talk about your Vi versus Emacs, spaces versus tabs, or any of the other religious wars that infect tech but none are so widespread as the proper number of spaces at the end of a sentence. I’ve seen a lot of discussion of this lately, both on Irreal and elsewhere. The debate is evergreen.
The typewriter—or more specifically, monospaced fonts—is to blame. Generations of typists were taught to put two spaces after a sentence as a way of helping to visually separate one sentence from another. That doesn’t make sense with proportional fonts so the conventional wisdom now is that double spaces are not only unnecessary but the spawn of the devil. It seems like a nobrainer but, of course, it isn’t.
In the first place, there are a bunch of those typists still around who are loath or unable to give up their years of training. It’s ingrained and they can’t see any reason to change. After all, modern word processors and typesetting systems will automatically provide the correct spacing between sentences regardless of input so why should they change? This argument is taking place outside of the tech arena as well. People who would rather die than admit to being a geek are invested in the debate.
The argument rages within geekdom too. Even younger engineers who have never used a typewriter sometimes champion the two space rule. Their argument is that it’s easier to write scripts that parse sentences and distinguish between the end of a sentence and constructs such as “Mr. Jones” and “e.g.” if sentences end with two spaces.
That brings us to Emacs. Emacs, being infinitely configurable, lets you have it either way. You can set it to have sentences end with one or two spaces. The default—probably honoring the convention at the time—is to use two spaces. Of course, having a choice is the same as having a controversy so even Emacs users are caught up in the debate. And they’re really opinionated.
Partisans on both sides are giving no quarter. The single spacers can’t understand the revanchist attitude of the two spacers and the two spacers can’t understand the dogmatism of the one spacers. The truth, as usual, is that it doesn’t really matter: any decent typesetting software will do the right thing regardless of the input and Emacs will also do the right thing.
I was for years a two spacer but only because of years of using a typewriter. After a while I became convinced that a single space was better if only for parsimonious reasons so I changed. Emacs continues to do the right thing and I can’t remember suffering any adverse consequences.
There are lots of debates that matter. This isn’t one of them.