> I dislike the way it looks like JSON but isn't.
Sticking on the topic of syntax, JSON has its own annoyance that the extra comma on the last field will be a syntax error when other languages let you get away with it. A field that goes over two lines is the exception so there should be a more verbose syntax for that rather than for single line fields in my opinion.
> As broken as CSS is, it is here to stay for the a while yet.
I prefer SASS with significant whitespace, no semicolons and no braces. :P
> Also FWIW, I know it's a holy issue but when you copy lines round in python etc you ARE having to add and remove those extra bits of syntax except they're invisible, they're spaces/tabs (don't even). Any sane person would have to have white space visibility turned on in their editor so would just be looking at cruft anyways.
Hmm, so in pretty much all IDEs, I can paste Python code then do TAB or shift+TAB to fix the indentation level as what you pasted is still selected. Having to add e.g. curly braces/bracket to fix nesting is miles more cumbersome and error-prone when there's a syntax error. It's super irritating trying to work out where the missing brace/bracket is.
I'm less concerned how it looks and more concerned how easy it is to move lines of code around plus find syntax errors. I'm still amazed how bad syntax error messages are at helping you work out what's wrong.