Maybe. As someone with a Lisp background moving to Python (day job), all the semantics hidden behind whitespace makes me just a bit nervous. The parens, for me,

Maybe. As someone with a Lisp background moving to Python (day job), all the semantics hidden behind whitespace makes me just a bit nervous. The parens, for me, make structural editing easier and also give a means of keeping the syntax around even when the whitespace gets damaged by whatever editing operations are happening. (But whitespace sensitivity has always struck me more as a way to enforce specific whitespace conventions than anything else, and even as far back as Pascal I've been religious about maintaining indention in code. It's easy to do with a decent editor (or not) and helps the readability immeasurably.)