fully agree with you. the downvotes must be by Python fanboys seething in their indented whitespaces.
Significant whitespace is a huge success even in languages that switched to it late! Almost nobody in the F# or Scala¹ community would consider to switch back to that unnecessary line noise which are explicit block markers.
Code should be indented for readability anyway (and almost nobody would dispute that)! So there is just no real value in additional block markers. In fact such block markers make refactorings more difficult than needed.
¹ https://august.nagro.us/scala3-braces.html
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BTW: Contrary to your opinion stated in your profile "subtracting points" for writing things the majority here disagrees with is not fascist in any way but exactly the mechanism that keeps the quality of the comments here high—which in turn attracts those "smart people hanging out here" (who you're praising) in the first place. ;-)
I dislike block markers as much as forced white-space, because there is lack of freedom. I understand that this was done so that different people could easily read legacy code but I don't think this helps because despite Python zen, there way too many ways to do the same thing. Why not allow the programmer to get creative so that at least the code is elegant? Elegance is highly readable.
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BTW: I think a good mechanism would be: "do not reward if it is not worth it" and "reward if it is." But the Fascist aspect here is: "punish if it is not worth it." Who decide what is worth what? Opinions vary. If everybody thinks alike, nobody is really thinking. Answers that earn higher points may be attractive to a majority of people, but you well know that the majority are of average intelligence (IQ is normally distributed). So mediocre quality gets upvoted, anything the mediocrity-loving majority doesn't, gets downvoted. Makes sense? The intelligent people I refer to are those who like me, question, probe, disagree, and dare to say it like it is. :) That does not mean the majority.
It's not noise, though. It protects me from common whitespace issues like careless copying/pasting, style differences between me and other developers, and IDE/OS settings.
It's also just easier to scan. Imagine if we did the same thing with math:
a * b / (c - d)
a*b/ c - d
On the other hand: Let's consider what the Python-like version of math actually look like:
f(x) = :
x, if x > 0
-x/2, if x < 0 and x is even
0, otherwise
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/
| x, if x > 0
f(x) = < -x/2, if x < 0 and x is even
| 0, otherwise
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