(Of course the reality is that braces are how you write scoping information and indentation is how you read it, and CQRS is actually a good thing.)
You can prefer them be coupled for taste reasons but they are fundamentally different. Code minification is a practical example where you can save many characters by omitting whitespace.
This is like tabs vs spaces. The white spaces crowd prefer the trade offs, and the tab crowd don't. But the white space crowd can't argue the perks of tabs - they exist.
disclaimer: Am braces/whitespace camp.
Now that terrible text editors won, I have to watch a 2 Vs 4 space war.
If only we could have a character that could represent indentation and people could set the rendering so they can visualise it in their own preferred way.
And folks who want to remove braces should be pointed to the Apple certificate snafu.
> Now that terrible text editors won
yes. but not all hope is lost, maybe AGI helps/wipes us out!
However I would be completely on board if we could agree on a formatting configuration file that people could check into a repo for IDEs to pick up.
For language-specific formatting, you can run formatters in pre-commit-hooks and CI. Treefmt[2] can help with that if you want to cover a lot of languages in your repo.
It looks like IntelliJ supports it, so that could cut down on the amount of work required to get it in a project.
I see it, I understand the argument for coupling them. But the argument makes an assumption I am not comfortable with - it says they are there for the same exact same reason, which is not actually true. It is often incidentally true in practice depending on the needs of the language - but it is not universally true across all needs in all languages.
It's the same thing with semi-colons. Having a statement separator provides practical benefits in several languages. In many of these languages, they are also optional.
If you were to say that all languages should parse both styles to get the best of both worlds, that wouldn't be completely unreasonable. But it makes the parsing more complex than necessary to support both, so only one is often supported - which is fair.
I mean, you can argue for having both for a myriad of reasons. It's redundant and no big deal, a lot of languages do just that. And some languages do fine with only indentation and no braces. But there is no language that does braces without indentation, or at least stylewise the code is always indented.