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"When your goal is to make something that looks like it was typeset by someone with an awareness of typographical conventions..."

If by that you mean typesetting, I agree. Typing and typesetting are two different activities.

LaTex, for example, will typeset both ".(one space)" and ".(two spaces)" into the same white space that is somewhat larger than one typed space and somewhat smaller than two.

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> If by that you mean typesetting, I agree. Typing and typesetting are two different activities.

Exactly, and many (non-developer) folks may not have ever experienced the "two spaces after sentences" convention if they haven't sat in a typing class with old-school typewriters, and haven't been instructed on formatting monospaced type.

I got into the habit of double spacing because it does make the TeX source code easier to read (and I often do just read that, rather than the typeset document), and also because emacs has a number of sentence based commands for which it uses the double space as a sentence delimiter.

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