I was bothered by the whitespace too, for an hour one afternoon in the spring of ~2001. Then I got over it and realized what a masterstroke it was, removing ~15% of the redundant visual noise.

Firstly, if you cut and paste so often that you feel it should take precedence over everyday readability and conciseness, then that’s a dev smell. Code is read 10x as much as written, likely one reason perl declined.

Secondly, you could simply toggle view whitespace on your editor or have it replace the indent chars on the tab key. Geany does this automatically via pref and it’s Python-specific support is basic.

Thirdly, Python3 and pep8 make issues even less likely than they were. Which is approximately never in my experience in the last ten years or so.

So, this subthread could have been on slashdot in ‘98, hence the frustration.

It’s such a fucking non-issue and productivity boon. Like using yaml for config instead of json.