That sounds like a gut reaction and not a reasoned argument. I was skeptical of it at first, but after coding some Python I decided all my reasons for hating it weren't valid. Turns out it's very practical and makes the code prettier. I don't like the language for other reasons, but the significant whitespace never gave me any problems, headaches, or weird spurious bugs.

The only negative thing about it for me was that hitting TAB in Emacs doesn't indent to the "proper" place (since it's impossible to actually determine the proper place). Instead, it would alternate amongst the valid tab points from most likely to least, which felt like a reasonable compromise to me.

Interestingly, I never hear anyone whine about Haskell's use of significant whitespace…

However, when a language comes around that actively enforces and promotes these rules... you say it's a "Bad Idea". Could you elaborate on why you think it's so bad?

Not particularly, no. Or at least I think that should be the IDE's problem.

You still have to tell the IDE what to do with your code, which you do with brackets, I guess?

So now your code is full of brackets and parentheses, which are naturally less readable (how many levels of parentheses do you use in natural language?), and their role is almost entirely to... help the IDE indent your code.

People, even before computers, invented several different types of formal logic notation just so that they'd have a language that was better suited to these sorts of puzzles. I don't think that code is a good approximation of natural language, nor do I think that it should try to be. Natural language is very poorly suited to expressing layers of abstraction, and even basic logical relationships.

Of course it's easier to write programs that resemble natural language, just as it's also easier to speak than it is to write Vx[Yx->...etc...] but that doesn't mean it's the best way to look at a problem.

#

But that's a bit besides the point. You can do it however you like, even with whitespace if that's your preference. The key is that the IDE has to be aware of the meaning of your code. Python's solution to that is to assert by fiat that the white space should be a syntactically meaningful unit in this sense, but it could be anything.

If you have the information there, then people can look at it and write it however they please.

2 or 3 (but I write mostly lisp (as a programming language) and I usually mumble them (the natural languages)..).

  (seriously.)

http://alexander.kirk.at/2010/02/16/collapsible-threads-for-...

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