I disagree, but in any case this is a better criticism than what's written in the original article. First of all, whitespace is the reality. The only relevant

I disagree, but in any case this is a better criticism than what's written in the original article. First of all, whitespace is the reality. The only relevant choice is for the compiler to consider it, or ignore it. You're arguing "wrong whitespace is error" so I guess we agree there. My main job is Python, and there's not a lot of work I need to do to fix the whitespace. It's literally a few Tabs / Shift+Tabs away! IDEs help a lot, the worst are REPL-like tools (Python's command line interface, or Jupyter) that fail to automatically remove leading whitespace in copy-pasted lines. Python goes a long way to helping tools by having the `:` (colon) as "new block" signal. I personally think that's superfluous, and it should be done away with. The broader point is, there are (or should be) techniques that eliminate these problems altogether; copy-pasting text is the problem - we should be copy-pasting AST instead. Same issues would happen e.g. in C++ if you copy-paste on `{` too much or too little... Copying AST instead of text would solve that as well.