Tabs vs spaces is one of those wars that seems like a joke until you work on a mixed team and see a diff full of noise because one file has tabs and another has spaces. Technically tabs make more sense: every developer sets the indentation width however they want in their editor, a tab is one character instead of four or two, and files end up smaller (yes, that's irrelevant today, but it was a real argument back in the 80s). The problem is that "everyone sets the width how they want" is also exactly why tabs break visual alignment — lined-up comments, ASCII tables, code with mixed tab-and-space indentation that looks perfect in your editor and a mess in someone else's. Spaces fix that at the cost of always being explicit. What you see is what's there, no configuration surprises. That's why most modern languages with strong conventions (Python, Go has its own opinion, JS with Prettier) push toward spaces or auto-standardize everything and take the decision out of your hands entirely. Honestly I think the deciding argument isn't even technical. It's that spaces remove a personal style choice from a collaborative context. Tabs are "better" in a world where only you ever see the code. Spaces win when the code gets read by more people than the one who wrote it — which is almost always the case. In the end what actually matters is picking a standard, setting up your editor and linter to enforce it, and never thinking about it again. The worst option of all is letting every file decide for itself.