If I had to guess, developers who pay more attention to corner cases and/or carefully consider the secondary and tertiary effects of a design choice will tend t

If I had to guess, developers who pay more attention to corner cases and/or carefully consider the secondary and tertiary effects of a design choice will tend to choose spaces. - "TABS WORK GREAT FOR ME" -> First-order effect - "If someone else views this file with a different tab width preference, the indenting will match their preference" -> Secondary effect - "If users' preferences can change the indenting of a file, then vertically aligned elements will align or misalign depending on who's viewing it and who wrote it." -> Tertiary effect. - "Randomly broken formatting and/or forcing users to constantly change their personal tab preferences is a bad way to work with code" -> Quaternery effect, etc. In other words, a whole-system view that accounts for interactions with other decisions might lead you toward using spaces, while an immediate "local" view might lead you to choose the thing that seems most convenient right now.