The formatting python enforces is just "layout reflects control flow". It's really not any more difficult than that, and it's a lot better than allowing layout to lie about control flow.

https://www.synopsys.com/blogs/software-security/understandi...

To each their own, but Python's use of indenting for structure is why I never tried it. It just felt, to me, like it was solving one problem with another.

I think Go gets this right: it consistently uses braces for structure, but has an idiomatic reformatting tool that is applied automatically by most IDEs. This ensures that the format and indentation always perfectly matches the code structure, without needing to use invisible characters.

I didn't like it for years but then I kind of got into it for testing out machine learning and I found it kind of neat. My biggest gripe is no longer the syntax but the slowness, trying to do anything with even a soft performance requirement means having to figure out how to use a library that calls C to do it for you. Working with large amounts of data in native Python is noticeably slower than even NodeJS.