I just don't get it. No one would argue that there clearly are different preferences in terms of the preferred indention width among different developers. So who on earth thinks: hey, I like an indention of 2 spaces. Let's just require that for every person on earth who will ever have to deal with my source code. Just indent with tabs and everyone is happy.<p>Furthermore, when people are asked why they prefer spaces, the answer very often is along the lines of "because then my code looks the same on every machine and no matter where I look at it". Which, in my opinion, is totally misguided. Indenting code is not about looking the same to everyone everywhere, it's about gaining the best readability for everyone, and there just can't be a sane default for that intrinsically.