The problem is that people use spaces and not TABs here.

The TABualator key was invented for this purpose, in the age of the typewriter, to make things visually stand out by grouping it in the same column of a table. So all the lines that belong together are listed with the same indent, (originally all items belonging in the same column being listed under the same heading).

Example

    user:
      given_name: something
      family_name: somenting

Using a somewhat randomly number of spaces is just silly, the two name lines is one hierarcical level below "user" so add one tab char to represent that fact. Then you can vary the visual representation in your editor to your liking.

json is created to make it easy for machines to parse, not humans. Leave it to the machines.

Actually: one of the reasons TABis misunderstood is that cheap typewriters didn't have adjustable tabulator positions, and when computers came along it was often implemented with fixed columns (typically every 8), so people think of TAB as 8 spaces, which often is not what you want.

There's a huge difference in desirability for white space significance depending on whether or not it is used for code or data storage. Because the best practice is to decompose your code in functions and classes, space significance isn't so much a problem in Python. YAML on the other hand, is a visually atrocious way to store tree-like/multi-layered data.

One of the nice things with Python compared to, say C, is that what you see visually is what you get. I.e. if you use TAB and not spaces to indent lines or are very careful about how many spaces you put in, but then you lose the ability to quickly change the visual representation.

In C you actually use indentation when you write code to make it readable for humans, but the machine doesn't care, so there is a disconnect between the visual and how it is parsed.

You have to both use indentation add a lot of curly-braces to your code. In Pyhon you don't have this double-work.

This is more of a tooling problem than a language problem. I haven't thought about Python whitespace in ages (i.e. since I switched to modern code editing tools).

Yep, whitespace should be used to make things "pretty", and some kind of 'tidy' program should be able to do it automatically. Counting the spaces and/or tabs and/or not even knowing which one it is, really sucks. Some editors help a bit with that, but it still sucks.