I actually find having a separate character for indentation is a strength of tabs rather than a detriment. Tabs tell you how the lines in your program relate t

I actually find having a separate character for indentation is a strength of tabs rather than a detriment. Tabs tell you how the lines in your program relate to one another, and spaces tell you how things relate within a given line. On top of that, I think the strongest argument for tabs is efficiency. space-indented code uses 3 times as many bytes to represent a level of indentation than tab-delimited code. That might not seem like a lot, but spread over all the commits in all the codebases using spaces, it seems pointless to use all that extra disk space for no reason. I think the real problem is that the default tab width for web interfaces is 8 spaces. If it were a more reasonable 4 characters wide, I doubt it would even be an issue.