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Switched from Java to Python as my main moneymaker several years go and I still don't understand why some people have such a big problem with significant whitespace.

You format your code anyway, right? So what's the difference if it actually means something?

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These people either work with very large codebases or have enough experience to understand that the average developer is careless enough to risk safety just for a little bit of convenience.

I'm personally keen on using % on vi or clicking on the braces for selecting scope in Eclipse and ACME. I also find them aesthetically appealing much like Lisp parenthesis.

I've seen a parallel in braced languages where the code spacing alignment was out of whack with the actual blocks as denoted with bracing and then people thought they were adding code to one block, but it was actually a parent block. People seem to inherently use white space to determine block scope.

If you have enough blank lines, { or } work as well in vim. At least that's what I use. Thinking about it, I only use % for parenthesis I think.

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