Truer for some languages than it is for others...

"Oh god, syntactically significant white space!"

I'm more bothered by Python's lack of homoiconicity (thus no good macro facility) and poor performance when compared to Common Lisp.

Python feels a bit like a toy Lisp with all the adult parts hidden.

Yeah that screen space, truly a limited resource. You should cram everything together and don't forget to be extra clever in the middle of the dense unreadable forest of sigils as well. It was hard to write, it should be hard to read.

While I agree that in programming we should break our code in logical paragraphs, just like in prose, such conventions (placing closing brackets on their own line) are detrimental for that purpose. For me this doesn't have anything to do with wasting vertical space, as it has to do with aesthetics.

I'm not really speaking for LISP, but in my projects what really bothers me are people that don't have common sense when indenting / formatting their code and so they start using IDE or build plugins, using common conventions and formatters that will never be able to understand the meaning of the code being formatted, making a total mess of other people' carefully crafted code. And we go round and round on this.

While your sarcasm is mildly amusing, your point doesn't apply.

I don't advocate writing cryptic code. Of course I prefer code that is easy to read. That's a major basis for my opinions on syntax.

Do you think Python's syntax is cryptic and hard to read, because of the lack of end parens? Or did you just misunderstand my point completely?