If a system requires thought and care to be used properly then people will inevitably use it improperly. Even skilled, thoughtful people make mistakes or get fa

If a system requires thought and care to be used properly then people will inevitably use it improperly. Even skilled, thoughtful people make mistakes or get fatigued and take shortcuts. It seems to me that using tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment is a fragile technique. It's easy to make a mistake and not even notice. If you don't fix that mistake fast, people start to assume that maybe it's OK to ignore whitespace formatting issues. And so the problem compounds. I would prefer to use a system that creates a "pit of success" so that even careless people have a hard time doing it wrong. I think sticking to just one whitespace character is better than mixed tabs and spaces, but best of all is using an editor that can automatically format your code.