Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Sunday's "Silicon Valley."

Sunday's episode of "Silicon Valley" was a return to normalcy. Richard's back in charge of his company Pied Piper and the crew brought in a few new hires. With everything appearing to go right for Richard right now, it was a chance for the episode to have a bit of fun and that came in the form of a largely trivial debate in the coding world.

Early in the episode, Hendricks freaks out when he learns one of his new employee’s "commits" — a batch of written code — was made using spaces over tabs.

The discussion over whether using tabs or spaces dominates the length of the episode. And, by the end, it even brings Richard's budding relationship with a Facebook employee to a screeching halt.

"I don't think this going to work. I'm so sorry. I mean like what, we're going to bring kids in the world with this hanging over their head? That's not really fair, don't you think?" Hendricks spits out in a rage.

"Kids?" asks Winnie, confused. "We haven't even slept together yet."

"And guess what?" Richard angrily replies, "That's never going to happen now. Because there's no way I'm going to be with someone who uses spaces over tabs."

It's a classic "Silicon Valley" scene, sitting right at the nexus of hilarity, nerdiness, and deep-cringe where the show has built its comedy brand.

But, besides the end of the first real romance we've seen Richard get involved in, what the heck was going on here? The show gives non-coders a bit of context earlier in the episode, letting us know that the tabs-vs.-spaces is a largely trivial coding debate that Richard has neurotically strong opinions on.

Here's what the argument is actually about though.

Code typically isn't written in what-you-see-is-what-you-get editors like Microsoft Word. Rather, it's often typed as raw text, with all the formatting created line-by-line.

And as Jamie Zawinski explained in a blog post entitled "Tabs versus Spaces: An Eternal Holy War" way back in 2000, code is typically formatted using variously large indents and whitespaces, like so:

jwz.org

The clauses in code which are more indented are generally speaking subordinate to the less-indented ones above them. So the formatting serves more than an aesthetic purpose; it's part of the visual language coders use to communicate.

But, historically, there have been two ways to create that whitespace: Richard's favorite, tabs, involves fewer key presses (and thus, in most cases, fewer characters for the computer program to remember), but is a bit imprecise. Winnie's favorite, spaces, offers coders a more specific and literal way to create their indentations. However, it's slower to use and uses up more storage space.

In his 2009 blog post "Death to the Space Infidels!" Jeff Atwood visually represents the difference:

Spaces, represented by dots, are on the left. Tabs, represented by arrows, are on the right.

Trivial as the debate may seem, it runs hot in coding circles. (As of this writing, there are 277 comments on Atwood's article.) And it has some importance. Atwood points toward a 1984 study that shows that programmers are much better at reading code written in the style with which they are familiar.

And when teams working on code disagree, it can spark infighting, as both blog posts recall.

Fortunately for programmers of the world, newer software often handles all these formatting concerns on its own. So fewer coding teams, or fictional relationships, should fall apart because of them.