Maybe it’s just because they’ve given up? I mean, what’s the point.

> Python brings new meaning to 'off by one errors' by offering 'off by one' indentation errors. (EDIT: quoting a tweet on that thread)

Imagine a long chunk of procedural code. Simple but tedious automated munging. "If conditional" codepaths depending on whitespace/indentation makes diffs very hard to read and codepaths harder to keep track of. Similarly no way to mark off logical blocks other than with comments.

For any code longer than half a screenful, indentation based semantics is very unpleasant.

I’ll even go a little farther and say that python has a bunch of warts for anything beyond beginner programming (and of course many nice parts too).

But all of that is somewhat tangential to “freedom to have your own style”. I like standardization, auto-formatting, etc. I just wish there was better syntax for encoding structure.