# if x:
if 1: # DEBUG
block if 1: # x:
blockThis. I'm convinced half the reason Ruby is displacing Python is that it's actually practical to talk about Ruby code in forums without ridiculous little-known workarounds like pastebins.
The Ruby community itself does strike me as more energetic though. All the activity on github etc seems a lot more impassioned to me than the coolheaded & practical world of Django et al.
Hotfixing is a naturally perilous process regardless of language. I've spent hours tracking down untested hotfixes in Java.
You're also probably less likely to come across a badly formatted block of python code because that would generally result in a bug. Much like misplaced brackets in Java/C/C++ would result in a bug.
It doesn't make the code magically better. It makes it less redundant. Indentation should already be there, why do you need curly brackets?
Copying and pasting is also known as refactoring. A syntax that makes that much harder than it needs to be is mis-optimized, IMO.
It's also fun to spend an hour looking for a bug caused by somebody inserting a tab instead of a space somewhere. We had a production crash that took us a long time to fix because somebody hotfixed a file with the wrong editor and did this.
I also don't understand how forcing people to indent code in the same way magically makes people write good code. The kind of programmer that can't or won't indent his code properly is introducing bugs far more serious than bad layout into your project.
Python's a nice language in many ways but I consider the syntax to be a bug.