8 spaces is a ridiculous waste of real estate, to me. It's far too much for a single layer of indentation, and I find it _harder and slower to read_.

On the other hand, if you mandate tabs, and tab stops are smaller than the most extreme person prefers them to be, you get the ultimate disaster of mixed tabs and spaces--which is yet another good reason to turn everything into spaces.

A 5-space first tab, for paragraph indentation, was the standard for fixed width text for a very long time until not all that long ago. How quickly we forget.