> Second, editing the plain text crontab is error prone

Doesn't every crontab in existence have a comment line giving the order of the time columns? I know I always rely on such.

Although the article didn't touch on it, this point reminded me of yesterday's discussion about manpages and command-line options. I think it's still the case today that `cron -e` is the way to edit the crontab whilst `cron -r` (the key right nextdoor in case this part needed stressing!) removes it altogether.