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I find brackets help me understand structure from a distance much better than whitespace.

Misplaced brackets seem like a thing from the past to me when we didn't have IDEs. I don't remember ever having a bug due to that.

by zahlman2 hours ago|

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> I find brackets help me understand structure from a distance much better than whitespace.

I can't imagine how. Whitespace physically lays out the block structure on the screen; braces expect you to count and balance matching symbols, and possibly scan for them within other line noise.

by KptMarchewa26 minutes ago|

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This is a 00s POV. If you spend any time on syntax formatting in 2026, you're wasting it. It's a solved problem.

Any reasonable language with braces has standard formatter that will just put each brace level on a different whitespace level.

by polytely2 hours ago|

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Working in C# i feel basically still read code structure by the visual block structure / indentation. I dont think I've ever counted braces in my professional life. The IDE makes sure it is formatted correctly and ambiguity is basically impossible.

by pmontra1 hours ago|

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Nevertheless it happens that while moving code around one wonders what indentation level that code should go. Undo, undo or git show the original code, look at it, retry more carefully.

Brackets would allow the editor to autoindent the pasted code.

No choice is perfect.

by bazoom422 hours ago|

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So you would find bracketed code without any use of indentation easier to read than python?

by pmontra1 hours ago|

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It's no more 1990, when Python was born. Editors have been automatically indenting bracketed code for a long while. Probably notepad doesn't, or maybe plain vanilla vim.

by johncearls1 hours ago|

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Whitespace forcing proper indentation practices has always been one of my favorite aspects of python. I TA'd a data structures in C++ class and the lack of proper indentation making code unreadable was my biggest pet peeve. I always made the student fix their indentation before I would help them debug it.

I know that is mainly a beginner coding issue, but never having to deal with that issue was always one of the biggest advantages of python.

That said, I believe a lot of the stuff that was added in 3 and beyond (to make it more typesafe, accounting for unicode, etc) has made it a lot less readable over time. You can argue that it has made Python a better and safer language, but the pseudocode aspect has gotten worse. I kinda miss that.

by jeltz3 hours ago|

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Python and C are the only language in which I have experienced that class of bugs. And that is due to if statements without brackets in C and because Python has meaningful indentation which people have accidentally messed up when refactoring.

And today with autofotnatters I think only Python is still vulnerable.

by zahlman3 hours ago|

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If you are messing up indentation accidentally during refactoring there is either something wrong with your tooling (including your text editor) or you are letting things get too far out of hand before starting the refactoring.