It's 2011. We love significant whitespace now, get on with the times...
Getting stuck and being frustrated hurts motivation a lot.
Now curly brackets and syntax may be seen by a person as an irritation or inconvenience compared to whitespace, but I'd say it's better to use a language with an inconvenience than one which is more likely to leave you stuck.
You, I and others used to programming with insignificant whitespace have developed and eye for detail and can rapidly spot a whitespace but. The general population with no programming experience can't consistently space most of the documents in their life, but they can typically place periods correctly.
I'd argue that for a beginner it's equally difficult.
And how about this equally difficult to spot classic bug:
if (f==x)
do_something()
and_also_do_this() //oops!
I propose we don't talk about languages with "significant whitespace", but instead about "languages with proper indentation enforced".
Yes, 'significant whitespace' is too sweeping a term to be useful. I've heard people complain about Python's 'significant whitespace' until they realize that it uses basically the exact same whitespace rules as Java does, except with sensible indentation rules instead of braces.
Is it? Assuming you use a fixed-width font, any incorrect/inconsistent indentation should stand out like a sore thumb. More so than counting { }s in nested blocks. (Of course, decent editors help with both cases, so I think it's essentially a non-issue.)
Visually they look the same, but finding those problems is a pain.
Anyway --you're a Smalltalk guy. How do you get to talk about weird syntax people don't like? Do many people like interleaving-argument selectors?
As for Smalltalk, yes, they do like them, since faking them by passing literal hashes is a common pattern.
Those people don't use Python anyway. There are a shit ton of people disliking anything you can think of. I don't know of many people that tried actually USING Python and still dislike the use of whitespace.
I also don't think the "whitespace haters" are intelligent about it or have any basis. For one, you should follow EXACTLY the same whitespace conventions in any bracketed language, even C. That is: you should properly indent blocks, and you should not mix spaces and tabs. If someone does not do that, I don't really think many people would like to work with his code. And if he already does that, then Python's whitespace is not any different, it just removes the brackets.
"""as well as it being the source of a great many bugs."""
I cannot think of ANY bug that can be caused by Python's use of significant whitespace. On the contrary, it prevents a lot of common bugs in bracketed languages (if/else nesting, etc).
The only think Python's use of whitespace can cause is compiler error messages (when you have messed the indentation) -- which is totally different from "bugs".
So, what bugs are you talking about? Any specific example?
"""As for Smalltalk, yes, they do like them, since faking them by passing literal hashes is a common pattern."""
Literal hashed are more like named arguments than Smalltalk selectors. For one, elements inside them are optional...
If you don't think it has ever caused bugs, then you aren't thinking very hard or you've not looked into the opposing point of view at all. In any case, I'm done discussing it with you.
Yeah, I thought that was your conception on the issue: i.e just blind prejudice.
"""If you don't think it has ever caused bugs, then you aren't thinking very hard or you've not looked into the opposing point of view at all. In any case, I'm done discussing it with you."""
You invoked some mysterious bugs due to Python's whitespace rules, I asked for a specific example, but conveniently "you are done discussing it".
Nice.
It's not blind prejudice, signifigant white space is a valid reason to dislike a language; that's anything but blind. That is but one of several reasons I don't like Python, and none of them are blind. Ruby is my scripting language of choice when Bash isn't sufficient.