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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.

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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.

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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.
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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.

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