[btilly]

I was not trying to convince.

That said, the effort of one versus the other is so trivial that there is no point in ever using effort as an argument either way. Doubly so because what seems like effort to us is simple unfamiliarity.

What is important is which one leads to more careless errors in practice. As a trivial example, consistent indentation takes effort, but failing to do it leads to more careless errors. Therefore everyone indents code.

The only data point I've seen on that is the side remark about Mesa in https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/E.... That remark, therefore, is the only argument that I care about.