Significant whitespace is a big turn off for me too. What you gain in concision for small examples you more than lose in tooling and code manipulation.
I used the think the exact same thing. However, after spending some time with tools that do consider white space significant (coffeescript, haml, sass) I have come to prefer it. It's part noise reduction and part consistency between devs and environments that I prefer.
Because you can't automatically re-indent code. In a language like C or Javascript, I can just copy, paste and move chunks of code around and have pristine re-indentation with a keypress. In Haskell, Python, or Coffeescript I have to be very careful and have to manually re-indent if I want to move code or change scopes.
Whitespace is much better left as a purely aesthetic feature, IMO.
Comments
Significant whitespace is a big turn off for me too. What you gain in concision for small examples you more than lose in tooling and code manipulation.
I used the think the exact same thing. However, after spending some time with tools that do consider white space significant (coffeescript, haml, sass) I have come to prefer it. It's part noise reduction and part consistency between devs and environments that I prefer.
I've been burned many, many times in python by the indentation.
Why would significant whitespace impede tooling? If the compiler can parse it, why can't your refactoring tools?
Because you can't automatically re-indent code. In a language like C or Javascript, I can just copy, paste and move chunks of code around and have pristine re-indentation with a keypress. In Haskell, Python, or Coffeescript I have to be very careful and have to manually re-indent if I want to move code or change scopes.
Whitespace is much better left as a purely aesthetic feature, IMO.