this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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So I'm going to say what I always say when people complain about semantic whitespace: Your code should be properly indented anyway. If it's not, it's a bad code.
I'm not saying semantic whitespace is superior to brackets or parentheses. It's clearly not. But it's not terrible either.
As someone who codes in Python pretty much everyday for years, I NEVER see indentation errors. I didn't see them back when I started either. Code without indentation is impossible to read for me anyway so it makes zero difference whether the whitespace has semantic meaning or not. It will be there either way.
This leads to weird bugs when you change indentation and miss a line or reorder lines. The logic changes. Not too bad when you’re on your own, as Python seems to be intended for. Add multiple developers and git merges and it is a recipe for disaster. With end tags at least you just end up with poorly formatted working code.
It's probably more prone to mistakes like that, true. But in practice I really never witnessed this actually being a problem. Especially with tests and review.