There's a point in the article where the author calls me and others "poor condemned souls" who "argue for the eugenic purity of proportional fonts". Obviously,

There's a point in the article where the author calls me and others "poor condemned souls" who "argue for the eugenic purity of proportional fonts". Obviously, I've never said such a thing, and at first I took some offense even though it was just a bit of hyperbole. I wrote a fairly harsh reply here and I'm taking the opportunity to edit it to be a bit calmer. Although I prefer proportional fonts, I've always been respectful of those who prefer monospaced fonts. I recognize that most programmers use monospaced fonts and I have no quarrel with that. In fact, one of the explicit goals of my indentation and whitespace style is to be equally readable in monospaced and proportional fonts. Life is full of tradeoffs, and here one of them becomes apparent. If you use column aligned code, you give up readability in proportional fonts, and also, as several others pointed out in these comments, you give up ease of editing and diffing. And while the alignment makes vertical scanning easy, it makes horizontal visual scanning more difficult. Column alignment has a strong appeal nonetheless. I used column aligned styles exclusively for probably 20 years or more. After all, my second language was assembler! But about 15 years ago I experimented with using indentation only without alignment, and I quickly found that the advantages of giving up alignment outweighed its advantages for me and the people I worked with. I've noticed that hardly any of the developers I work with today use column alignment in their code, and they all use monospaced fonts. Now I'm curious to ask them if they just never used alignment, or if they used to use it and stopped as I did.