Can someone help me understand the rationale behind semantic whitespace as a replacement for explicit delimiters? Is it purely aesthetic?
I'd call it pragmatic.
But I think it was more relevant years ago. These days I see a lot of people using code formatters.
It works in practice, same difference to me tbh.
Reading Python has always been a bit of a headache for me, but that probably has as much to do with the lack of type annotations as it does the lack of braces.
However, languages that have a line length limit are the blight of them. There isn't a python formatter that won't make everything mush. My if clause that is 81 chars wide doesn't need to be broken up. Similar, my strings don't need to be reflowed.
Go fmt ignores line length, and always produces a formatted file that is pretty as a result.
I don't like long lines, but reflowing logic is way to aggressive in these formatters.
I think it's Python's only real strength. The language is ugly, the interpreter is a genuinely deficient way of making software ("Why use a compiler when you can just write thousands of unit tests to check for syntax errors!?"), and the mechanisms for abstraction are fairly weak - even after all that, n00b Python code is fairly readable.
You can never have a "goto fail" kind of bug.
That might be a bit TOO contrived, at least for me. I could see this coming up for someone working with jurassic hardware not under their control though.
Anyway, to play along. I think curly braces help tell what is happening in long source files with deep nesting. But also you could just render whitespace characters as something visible to count them to judge indentation at a glance to get your bearings. Of course the real answer here is don’t write long source files with deep nesting, but unfortunately other people are allowed to write code :p
Like the late 1980s, when Guido was creating Python?
I say that from experience: when I was first learning to program I found C much easier than python for this exact reason, and I was not using syntax highlighting.
That might be because I was much more prone to nesting back then. These days I get annoyed when I have two levels of indentation inside a function and treat three as a reminder to refactor. But when I started programming I'd build pyramids 8-10 levels deep and argued with people who tried to help simplify it.
I hear the argument quite frequently that semantic whitespace makes it hard to move code around (or that it causes code to get messed up in various ways) and I keep wondering why that doesn't describe my own experience as a daily user of Python. Maybe a lot of it is that I tend to avoid more than a couple of levels of indentation like the plague, and therefore it's rare for there to be any confusion about where a particular line of code would "belong".
'{}' has the advantage that it expresses structure in a single line - copy a block of code from one place to another and your editor can throw it almost anywhere and the structure is preserved...
Modern day text editors all preserve indent wonderfully and can indent/outdent as a matter of course...but to some troll insisting on using ed or notepad or Microsoft Word I can see the difficulty.